Assessing Knowledge Retention for Online and Classroom Boating Safety Courses

In 2008, NASBLA identified a need to investigate the efficacy of online boating safety courses that have been approved by NASBLA and a grant proposal on this topic was funded by the U.S. Coast Guard. The research question asked if there are differences between classroom and online courses with regard to knowledge retention after a four-month time period.
 
However, due to changing requirements within the online courses, NASBLA, the United States Coast Guard, and HumRRO research staff agreed to revise the study to investigate participant retention rates for the classroom training condition only. The original research question was replaced by the following two research questions: (a) What is the level of knowledge retention among participants completing the boating safety training in a classroom environment and (b) Is knowledge retention differentially related to variables such as age, gender, level of boating experience, and geographic area (secondary question)? Data collection was conducted in 2009 (Deatz, Gossman, Kulp, & Trippe, 2010). The final report for the project can be found here.