Academic Performance between Resident and Distance Education Programs in the U.S. Army War College
Open AccessThis study used a convergent quantitative-dominant mixed methods design to investigate the relationships among variables that may affect academic performance across six graduate-level national security courses taught in both the resident and distance education programs at the U.S. Army War College (USAWC). Four research questions explored the relationships between student academic performance, student characteristics, and program format; how faculty who taught in both programs perceived the same relationships; and how students understood their attainment of learning outcomes in both programs. Three constructs formed the framework for this pragmatic approach: Astin’s (1991) inputs-environment-outcomes (I-E-O) model of student development, the nontraditional student attrition model of Bean and Metzner (1985), and McClusky’s (1963) theory of margin for psychological load.Five hundred forty-five U.S. Army officers from one class comprised the sample, with 219 officers in the ten-month resident program and 326 officers in the two-year distance program. De-identified quantitative data from the institutional database consisted of student grades in six core courses, student responses on end-of-course surveys, and five student characteristics: Army career specialty, Army component, gender, graduate degree status, and race/ethnicity. Six faculty who had taught in both programs participated in semi-structured interviews to elicit their beliefs on the relationships among these variables. Quantitative data were analyzed using t-tests, correlation analysis, and hierarchical multiple linear regression. A side-by-side joint display mapped the quantitative results, with qualitative context, to the three components of Astin’s (1991) I-E-O model for analysis.For the environment finding, program format is a significant predictor of grades in only two courses at the beginning and end of the USAWC curriculum. The principal finding for inputs reveals that professional characteristics (Army component and career specialty) are significant regression predictors of USAWC grades while the demographic markers of gender and race are not. Finally, the principal finding regarding outcomes showed that the grade in the first USAWC course, Strategic Leadership, is the most significant predictor of the grade in the subsequent five courses when included as an independent variable in the regression models. Implications for policy and research in senior professional military education and civilian executive education are discussed.
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