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Objectives and Purposes
The purpose of this meta-analysis is to provide a synthesis of the research literature of web-based K-12 distance education from 1999 to the present, across content areas, grade levels, and outcome measures. The first goal was to determine the effects of distance education on K-12 academic achievement. The second goal was to identify the effects on student outcomes of the features of distance education, including content area, duration of use, frequency of use, grade level of students, role of the instructor, type of school, timing of interactions, and pacing of the learning.

Significance
With the emphasis on scientifically-based research and the call for evidence-based program decisions in the federal No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, detailed knowledge is needed to guide the growing numbers of cyber/online/virtual school developers and educators. The explosion in virtual schools, especially virtual charter schools in the United States, has necessitated a fresh look at the knowledge base. The need is for research that guides practitioners in refining practice so the most effective methods are used. Although technology-enabled distance education for pre-college students is nearing its century mark, comparatively little research has been published that can serve to guide instructors, planners, or developers. The temptation may be to attempt to apply or adapt findings from studies of K-12 classroom learning or on adult distance learning, but K-12 distance education is fundamentally unique.

Perspective or Theoretical Framework
A synthesis of studies of the effectiveness of distance education programs for K-12 learners has a number of advantages. Because all of the studies included in this review drew data from school-based classes, the review can provide valuable insight into the practical effectiveness of K-12 distance education. Controlled experimental research may offer findings of theoretical interest but may not be generalizable to complex learning settings such as virtual schools or classes. The uncontrollable cultural and social variables naturally present in a school or class, whether online or on-ground, make a statistical synthesis a more exact test of the strength of K-12 distance education. The effects of virtual learning would have to be strong and consistent to be measurable across a range of natural milieus.

Research Methods
Meta-analysis is an established technique for synthesizing research findings to enable both a broader basis for understanding a phenomenon and a parsing of influences on the phenomenon. Meta-analysis, the use of statistical analysis to synthesize a body of literature, is appropriate for answering questions such as these because it allows comparison of different studies by computing an effect size for each study. Meta-analysis is used to estimate the size of a treatment’s effect, and allows investigation into relationships among study features and outcomes (Bangert-Drowns 2004). The stages of the meta-analysis were identification and retrieval of applicable studies, coding of study features and findings, and data analysis.

Results or Expectations
The studies included in the analysis yielded over 100 independent effect sizes drawn from a combined sample of over 7000 students whose performance as a result of participation in a distance education program was compared to control groups in which students did not participate in distance education. The analysis resulted in an overall weighted effect size not significantly different from zero, a result that is in line with the results of recent meta-analyses of distance education, which tend to show that distance education is as effective as classroom instruction. The results indicate that some applications of distance education appeared to be much better than classroom instruction and others are much worse. The analysis showed that for the factors examined, distance learning did not outperform or underperform classroom instruction.

Implications for Practice
The consistency of the effects shown in the studies analyzed in this review suggest that as distance education is currently practiced, educators and other stakeholders can reasonably expect learning in a well-designed distance education environment to be equivalent to learning in a well-designed classroom environment. Policy-makers and practitioners should continue to move forward in developing and implementing K-12 distance education programs when those programs meet identified needs and when they are designed and managed as carefully as traditional education programs. The “no significant difference” result reported here and elsewhere lends confidence to distance educators that their ongoing efforts are likely to be effective. This synthesis, considered together with current policy and recent research findings, demonstrates that students of many types and ages, can learn in many content areas using the flexibility and choices afforded by distance education.