WHAT IS THE ROLE OF MODALITY TO LEARNING DURING THE PANDEMIC?

Student performance in three semesters of Survey of Earth Science and Introduction to Astronomy classes will be presented, which includes 4 sections of face-to-face classes, 8 sections of asynchronous online, and 5 hybrid sections. These are all during the pandemic. The key metacognitive and pedagogic components used in of each of these modalities will be discussed and compared (i.e., use of discussions, reflections, communications, OOPS tokens, and the LMS). The completion rates and class grades will be presented and discussed. Since there are semesters that have multiple modalities of the same class which covers the same content, it will be suggested from these data that an asynchronous online modality can be more effective than face-to-face or hybrid.