The Effect of Distance Education on Print Literacy

Many definitions of literacy focus on the ability to read and write at an appropriate level. The feature of literacy is generally recognized as one of the key educational goals of compulsory schooling. It refers to the ability to read and write to an appropriate level of fluency. There is, of course, no universally accepted definition of literacy (Lawton & Gordon, 1996, p.138).By reviewing different definitions, we can say that literacy is the ability to read and write. In a broader sense, literacy involves reading, writing, listening, and speaking. To be print literate is to possess the ability to: (a) Read the printed material and analyze and interpret it, and (b) write for a wide variety of purposes, both practical and creative. Literacy also encompasses the ability to be an active listener and to speak with purpose and clarity (Lyons & Pinnell, 2001).One of the most prestigious definitions of literacy refers to UNESCO. United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has defined literacy as the ability to identify, understand, interpret, create, communicate and compute, using printed and written materials associated with varying contexts. Literacy involves a continuum of learning in enabling individuals to achieve their goals, to develop their knowledge and potential, and to participate fully in their community and broader society (UNESCO, 2004).Dudeney et al. (2014) define print literacy as the ability to perceive and create a variety of written texts, encompassing knowledge of grammar, vocabulary and discourse features alongside reading and writing skills. Learners in print literacy use various sources of information to understand the content. These sources generally are divided into three categories.The basic understanding of the concepts of print literacy includes text concept, book concept, orientation idea, mechanical properties, and alphabet knowledge. The concepts of print are essential for reading and writing (Clay, 2013; Justice & Ezell, 2004; Piasta et al., 2016). A literate person can understand the world around and express his/ her imagination through text and writing. Print literacy is a tool that enables the literate person to understand social reality at a different qualitative level (Akinnaso, 1991).We must acknowledge that reading does have an instrumental efficiency in the workplace and a range of other contexts. However, we also affirm that optimal participation in a literate culture requires frequent and active engagement in reading as a valued social activity and as an intelligence representation. Therefore, print literacy depends on the context as an attitude and a way of human life (McKenna, 2001).From a historical perspective, having a written text as a mediating tool has had major consequences for humanity. Literacy and written text have been a most noticeable impact on language and speech; thought; religion and culture; and social organization (Akinnaso, 1991).Thus, it appears that the lexical, syntactic, grammatical, and semantic complexity is the product of the emergence of written language. Print literacy also contributed to the development of scientific and social thought. The use of written language in specific fields has created specialized languages for dealing with abstract and complex issues (Gee & Hayes, 2011).An opportunity to store information has enabled humans to record their past and their explanations of the world, thus giving rise to such fields as history, art, and science. The text also provides the foundation for the creation of a society with the written law. Religious texts have enabled people to form communities around shared cultural values (Fischer, 2003; Purves, 1990).Through literacy and writing, we can move into the distant future without adhering to the present. Thus, by recording real and imaginative events, we can gather the sources of knowledge that these resources can serve as a valuable human heritage (Gee & Hayes, 2011).Preserving texts and other works in a physical environment protects human biological memory, and the physical preservation of the creative work promotes collective memory and enables human groups to create creative works and thereby promote human societies (Zaid, 2003).So we can conclude that writing and print literacy have played an important role in human history, and humans are always looking at creating their ideas in writing. Traditional forms of reading and writing are one traditional way for students to acquire and use information. According to ancient tradition, students are more confident in textbooks and see them as a reliable source of information. Today, using print resources is a key tool for measuring academic achievement. In most higher education systems, academic exams rely on print literacy and constitute a legitimate way of learning and academic advancement (Olson, 2013).As a form of information acquisition, the writing process is superior to the lecture because it is more detailed and organized. Written literacy excellence is mainly due to its proximity to the advancements of culture and science. Print literacy, especially writing, is ultimately responsible for the development of models related to science, philosophy, and mathematics. Even advances in technology appear to occur in societies with high proportions of print literacy. However, there are other factors, such as access to resources and the existence of value and belief systems. However, print literacy is a major tool for the development of cognition skills (Olson, 2014).In other words, people who can access and interpret information in print materials develop a level of sophistication and expectation that is different from the capabilities of verbal lectures. Indeed, many researchers have argued the difficulty of developing complex theories and models of thinking without print literacy skills and access to and interpreting information in print (Ong, 2012).Distance education (DE) is defined as an educational process in which a significant proportion of learning takes place remotely and flexibly beyond the formal learning environment. Therefore, DE is organized educational activities based on the use of learning materials, in which constraints on learning are minimized in terms of access, time, and place as well as pace and method of study or any of these. However, open and distance learning is used as an umbrella term to include both concepts of distance education and open learning. Supported open and distance learning improves the potential for teachers to develop better links between new teaching practices, their subject expertise and the application of the new methods in their classrooms (Perraton et al., 2002) as well as becoming competent in using emerging technologies for teaching and learning purposes (Shohel & Power, 2010). According to the European Commission (1995), distance education is concerned with the use of new resources (technical and/or nontechnical) for rendering the learning process more flexible in terms of space, time, content, selection, access qualifications, and teaching resources, and for improving distance access to education systems. In this way, educational opportunities are extended to people who, because of their geographical, economic or socioprofessional situation, or because of a handicap, do not readily have access to the mainstream system of education. Distance education can help overcome barriers to transnational mobility and develop a kind of virtual mobility. Open and distance learning involves a conceptual shift from the teacher to the learner and emphasizes the importance of student-centered learning that means a shift in research and practitioner interest from teaching and instructional design toward learning and the particularity of individual student response (Thorpe & Grugeon, 1987). Therefore, distance education focuses more on what the learner wants to learn, how the learner approaches learning and the sociophysical conditions for learning than what the learner should learn. Open and distance learning tries to motivate and empower the professional growth of individual teachers to engage individuals in their learning processes. However, supported open and distance learning is preferable for other reasons such as scalability, sustainability, and cost-effectiveness compared with the traditional face to face center-based training approaches (Oliveira & Orivel, 2003).We can say that distance education has been around for a very long time. It could be argued that in the Christian religion, St. Paul’s epistle to the Corinthians was an early form of distance education (a.d. 5357). The first distance education program was presented by the University of London in 1858. This program was in correspondence. Readings were mailed to students, and final exams were held at the university in person. If students could afford the cost, they hired a private tutor. However, the Victorian novelist Charles Dickens called it the Peoples University because it provided access to higher education to students from lower classes of society. The program continues to this day but is now called the University of London, with more than 50,000 students in 180 countries (Bates, 2015).In North America, historically, many universities, such as Penn State University, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of New Mexico, and Memorial University, the University of Saskatchewan and the University of British Columbia in Canada, have a long history in this field. As a result, these institutions have a long history of offering distance education programs. These programs have now been expanded to cover undergraduate and professional masters students. Australia is another country with an extensive history of postsecondary distance education. Today, distance education is being used as a new teaching tool alongside traditional education in many universities around the world. The use of hybrid and blended teaching, simulators, virtual reality, gamification, open education, and the emergence of MOOCs are new symbols of distance education in recent years (Bates, 2019).o Investigating the effect of distance education system on the print literacy of MA students at the University of Tehran.This study seeks to investigate the effect of distance education and traditional education on the development of print literacy and measure which type has more impact on it. The design of this study is quasi-experimental. In order to undertake the study, pretest and posttest were used in experimental and control groups. Fifty students comprised the control group, and 50 students were assigned to the experimental group. Considering the design of this study, which is a quasi-experimental, stratified random sampling was used for this purpose. The syllabus of courses in entrepreneurship faculty, education and extension field, and management faculty and government management fields were compared together both in traditional and distant education types in the winter semester of 2016. The government management is the field of study in management faculty and entrepreneurship faculty, education, and extension field. Students who study in attendant and virtual classes were selected as the samples of this study. Twenty-six students from traditional students and 23 from DE students (management faculty) and 24 students from traditional students and 27 from DE students (entrepreneurship faculty) in the winter semester comprised the participants. To gather data, a 44-item researchermade questionnaire was used (Appendix). The independent variable of this study is the instructional mode. There were two categories of the instructional mode: traditional education and online education. The dependent variable of this study is the print literacy as measured by the print literacy scale. In the first semester, print literacy questionnaire was given to both groups (traditional and online education).Both groups took their courses within the educational system itself during the semester. After the end of the semester, a print literacy questionnaire was distributed for both groups (Figure 1). The content validity index for the whole test of 44 items of print literacy was 0.63, which is an acceptable index compared to similar works. In order to calculate the reliability of the print literacy variable, Cronbach’s alpha was used. The reliability index for the total test was 0.72, which showed that most of the referees considered that the items of the questionnaire were necessary for measuring print literacy, which is at an acceptable level in comparison to similar studies. SPSS version 16 was used in all steps of the data analysis. The following features were measured in order to analyze data: frequency, percentage, standard deviation, T, covariance analysis, and Kolmogorov-Smirnov test. Regarding the aforementioned sections, the main purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of the distance education system on the print literacy of higher education students at the University of Tehran.Findings will be presented in three sections. In the first section, the variables of sampling of the population are described. In the second section, the research variables are explained, and in the last section, data will be analyzed based on the study’s hypotheses. Regarding the type of university, 49 out of 100 (49%) of the population were MA students of management faculty, and 51 out of 100 (51%) were MA students of entrepreneurship of Tehran University. Considering students’ age, 40% of the participants were younger than 25 years old, 37% of them were between 25–30 years old, and 23% were older than 30 years old. As seen in table and Figure 2, the distribution of the samples is shown based on the gender of the participants in this study. The P value of chi-square is 0.001, which is fewer than the P = 0.05, so there is a statistically significant difference between the frequency of the participants regarding their gender. Twenty-three out of 100 participants are female (23%), and 77 are male (77%).Table 2 demonstrates the descriptive statistics and the distribution of print literacy. 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Therefore, it can be (traditional has a more impact on print demonstrates the data of print literacy of for print literacy variable that there is no significant difference between the variables P = P = 0.05, so the is but not the Therefore, it can be that no significant difference was in learning and management variables between the control and the experimental group. type of teaching in this variable has an However, P value for writing, reading, and thinking are and which are fewer than = the is for these three factors, but not the It can be that there is a significant difference between writing, reading, and thinking in control and experimental groups. the mean of pretest for the reading variable has been which has been to the which shows that DE has reading skills. in the control group, the traditional teaching of reading in pretest was which has been to a significant This shows that has reading skills the mean of pretest in writing regarding print literacy is which has been to the This that DE has no effect on reading skills. However, in the control group, teaching of this has a mean of in pretest to in which shows that teaching has writing skills more than mean of pretest in thinking regarding print literacy is which has been to the This that DE has not to effect on thinking skills. in the control group, traditional teaching of this has the mean of in pretest to in which shows that has thinking skills more than it can be that has a significant impact on reading, writing, and thinking of print literacy Therefore, it can be that no significant difference was in learning and management variables between the control and the experimental that the variable of print literacy in the posttest of the experimental is lower than the control group. In other words, the that the variable of print literacy in the control that is in person is higher than the distance education. 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