Using ordinal data to assess distance learning

While academic research into educational technology has established flipped classrooms and formative assessment as effective and superior to traditional instruction and assessment, implementation of these new methods has been slow and piecemeal.The end of the 2020 spring semester saw nearly every classroom move to distance learning due to Covid-19.This distance learning required instructors to adopt fundamental features of flipped classrooms and formative assessment and provided an opportunity to study the significance of individual elements of these learning methods and their statistical relationship to one another.Likert Scale-style surveys were completed by high school students who were taking a mathematics class via distance learning.The Likert responses were treated as ordinal data, not continuous, and assessed on the presence or lack of stochastic dominance amongst the survey responses by the Kruskal-Wallis test and post hoc testing.This targeted the efficacy of individual techniques within formative assessment and flipped classrooms.The techniques that demonstrated significance individually were then examined with correlation and clustering analyses to determine if relationships existed and if those relationships were consistent with the literature on educational technology.The research methods used were tailored to fit the unique nature of the collected data and designed to assess whether core philosophies of flipped classrooms and formative assessment could be adopted individually, as wholesale adoption has proven to be quite difficult.