The impact of instructional modality on student course evaluations: a comparative analysis

The fall semester of 2020 brought a range of instructional modalities to university classrooms. Instructors at a large, public institution in the Midwest were allowed to choose between face-to-face, hybrid, online-synchronous, and online-asynchronous formats. The purpose of this study is to examine how students rated the effectiveness of courses using each of these different course instructional modalities. This investigation uses the Wilcoxon Signed Rank Test to examine how the distribution of student ratings changed for courses in the fall 2020 semester by using the fall 2019 semester as a baseline. The results show that online-synchronous and online-asynchronous courses received lower evaluation scores in fall 2020 than when the same courses were taught by the same instructor using the face-to-face format in fall 2019. Meanwhile, the evaluation scores for face-to-face and hybrid courses in fall 2020 showed no statistically significant change from the fall 2019 scores.