In-Person vs Blended Learning: An Examination of Grades, Attendance, Peer Support, Competitiveness, and Belonging

Since March of 2020, universities around the world have offered remote versions of courses to help limit the spread of COVID-19. Two years later, in the Spring 2022 quarter, the lectures in the CS1 course at our large, public research-intensive university were taught via two modalities---an in-person modality in which students attended traditional, in-person lectures and a blended modality in which students attended a remote lecture on Zoom. Every other course component---labs, discussions, office hours---were held in-person for both groups. The unique setup of the CS1 course allowed us to perform a comparative analysis of the outcomes and attitudes between the two groups. In this paper, we analyze the difference in course outcomes, peer support, competitive feelings in class, and students' sense of belonging between the groups. Our results indicate that students in the blended learning group attended lectures more frequently than their in-person counterparts yet performed 4-7%worse on the midterm and final exams. The blended learning group also experienced significantlyless feelings of competitiveness than their in-person counterparts. Interestingly, we discovered a consistent trend among our results indicating that the gap in grades, peer support, and classroom competitiveness between the blended group and in-person group was more pronounced among first- and second-year undergraduates than third- and four-year students. Despite the two learning groups having different instructors, our results shed light on the potential advantages and drawbacks of a blended learning experience in CS1 that instructors should consider when deciding on the format of their course.