Online credit-recovery courses may help students graduate on time and even enroll in college, finds a new working paper—but those students don’t seem to learn as much as peers in regular, face-to-face classes.
Researchers tracked data on credit and achievement from students in a large Midwestern school district from 2010 to 2017. They found students who took the online courses were 13 percent more likely to graduate than similar students who didn’t take the courses. And those who participated in credit recovery were about 2.5 percent more likely to enroll in college. But there was a negative association between taking online courses, primarily for credit recovery, and performance on districtwide standardized tests, the researchers found. And the more online classes students took, the worse they scored.
