Learning Economics at a distance: Quality and impact of expertise. A study with Open University students.

The research reported in this article is, considering the hypotheses, a replication of an earlier investigation with a different experimental population and in a different experimental setting. Where, in the earlier study, regular university students were involved, in the present study we focus on students studying in a distance education and open learning setting. One of the methodological difficulties with this research population is to reach a large and representative sample. As a consequence, the experimental group in the present study is limited in number, thus denying access to statistically significantly results in relation to all hypotheses tested.

Notwithstanding these methodological difficulties, the results are helpful to draw conclusions in relation to the quality and impact of expertise. As in the earlier study, attention was paid to the construction of a set of tests to grasp the complex nature of prior knowledge at the content level. The instruments used during the earlier study were improved in relation to their psychometric qualities.

Concerning the hypotheses about the quality of expertise, the results of this investigation revealed that students with different educational backgrounds and studying different diploma‐types, possess a complex of different expertise components.

In relation to the impact of prior knowledge on the acquisition of subject‐oriented knowledge, regression analysis reveals that expertise accounts for 37‐42% of the variance in post‐test scores. The optimization of the instruments used was helpful to differentiate to a better extent the impact of the three different expertise tests.

Since the results of the present study are consistent with the findings of the earlier study in relation to the quality and impact of expertise, more weight can be given to the arguments that can be put forward to support students, in the initial stage of their studies, to cope with the demands of specific domains to be studied.