Free World U was founded on the premise that the root cause of social dysfunction is inefficient education and that a virtual school and a system of accelerated learning can allow anyone from anywhere and at anytime to learn. Through our online learning system, Free World U strives to fill any gaps that may exist in student knowledge to enable students to achieve mastery of a given subject.

Internet-based learning has become extremely popular within the last decade, and virtual education programs have been created for students of all ages. There are approximately 2 million homeschoolers in the K through 12 range, and this number is growing at the rate of 30% annually. (Berg 1998; Warschauer 2000; Bennett 2001; McCombs and Vakili 2005; Annetta 2008; and Dani and Koenig 2008). In a decade, this will probably be the predominant form of learning. Though both technology and facilities for virtual learning programs are more widely available than ever before, such programs continue to be underutilized and underappreciated (Becker 2000; Anagnostopoulos, Basmadjian, and Mccrory 2005; Schmidt, Shelley, Wart, Clayton, and Schreck 2007). This is true, despite studies showing that virtual learning programs enhance student learning (Foltos 2002) and encourage students to pursue learning opportunities even outside the classroom (Becker 2000; Lynch and Warner 2004; Bers, New, and Boudreau 2004). Additionally, recognition is growing among actual school teachers that such programs are useful (Shaffer 2002; Lynch and Warner 2004) and that tech-savvy students are using available technology to learn—-whether or not that learning is part of a pedagogical program (Warschauer 2007; Ma, Wan, Lu 2008). The Free World U online learning system is designed to help students quickly learn and retain foundational content on their own, outside the traditional classroom environment.

Free World U works to eliminate confusion by sequentially introducing information that has been deconstructed to such a degree that it cannot be misunderstood. This approach ensures mastery. Free World U's flashcards each contain only small bits of information. Flashcards teach pronunciations, definitions, examples, descriptions, properties, relationships, methods, problems, skills, and other elements found in any particular course of study. Any content, no matter how complex, can be presented as a flashcard or series of flashcards as long as that content is deconstructed and subdivided sufficiently.

Our system presents information in a particular order. Complex concepts, such as instructions for balancing a chemical equation, require the comprehension of many basic definition and pronunciation facts before the actual problem can be introduced in its entirety. Our facts are presented in a question-and-answer format (Sommers and Smith 2001). This format is a more engaging pedagogical method, as it shows students something they can discover, rather than telling them the information they need to memorize (Stewart 2008). The benefits of this strategy can be further maximized by offering clues before providing answers to questions.

Electronic flashcards facilitate the presentation of facts. The principal utility of flashcards is their ability to be sorted according to levels of mastery. This presentation method offers students a means of maintaining their own accountability. Each flashcard contains a high quality, educationally-relevant graphic and may also contain a hyperlink to video or other media. These supplemental media support student learning by reinforcing relevant content (Butcher 2006, Sibbet 2008, and Metros 2008). Additional flashcard features include a direct feedback link, selected classical music (Dermond, 2007), and links that allow students to browse through all flashcard questions present within a subtopic.

The electronic flashcards in our system are arranged to facilitate intuitive use by students. All flashcards are sequentially ordered, in an interactive table of contents, according to school, grade level, subject, topic, and subtopic. For example, the flashcard set which teaches the third-grade mathematics concept of identifying the attributes of triangles would be located within the following table of contents:

Subtopics are the lowest level in the curricular hierarchy and contain groupings of flashcard clusters related by content. Subtopics for grades K-8 typically contain 10 to 15 flashcards each in the lower grades, gradually increasing to the point where high school level subtopics contain 40 to 50 flashcards.

After viewing a question and its corresponding answer, students decide upon an interval at which the flashcard will be shown again. A fact that the student is able to immediately identify correctly may not ever need to be viewed again, while a fact that is particularly challenging to the student may be shown again within a month, a week, a day, or within the same session. When the student reaches the end of a subtopic, all flashcards selected to be shown again remain in the “deck” while the others are eliminated.

Questions are structured to advance students from the foundation of basic definitions and pronunciations through increasingly complex modes of thought. The database stores students’ activities individually, tracking their responses for each and every flashcard, and gradually building a custom teaching program for each user. While questions are arranged in sequential order, each question within a given level of mastery is designed to stand alone: it does not require prior or subsequent questions for comprehension.

Twenty-four hours following self-reported completion of a subtopic of study, students in our for-credit program complete a test to assess their level of mastery. If students do not achieve 100% mastery, the flashcards in that subtopic are reset for review. All assessments are presented as multiple-choice questions, and students are scored by the system as responses are selected. To maximize the educational value of these assessments, incorrect responses result in tips to help students decipher their errors. For each incorrect answer, an explanation is provided for why the selected response was incorrect, rather than giving them the right answer. This stimulates critical thinking on the part of the student.

Once students pass each of the subtopic short-term tests, the questions are added to a pool of long-term retention test questions and re-administered at increasingly-distant intervals, ensuring complete content mastery. Questions previously missed are programmed to appear with greater frequency than questions initially answered correctly, ensuring ongoing review of challenging material. Facts are not considered mastered until they have been correctly answered on a minimum of two random assessment exposures. Brief long-term assessments, once added to a student's queue, are administered on a daily basis, conditioning the student to be perpetually engaged in active learning and thereby reducing test anxiety. Students can use the assessments as an accurate gauge of their progress, as well as an effective means of determining where true learning gaps may exist.

The Free World U innovative online learning system presents information in the form of highly-simplified, hierarchically-organized learning units which help students progress systematically through all required material. In our system, students do not progress to more complex material until they have mastered every unit of required prior knowledge, thereby building effective cumulative critical thinking skills that facilitate future learning.

Student-directed learning can also avoid some of the human error that gets in the way of education in a traditional classroom setting. Meadow and Howeley (1998), for example, showed how high school science teachers who harbored their own incorrect assumptions about the nature of scientific investigation not only passed on incorrect views to their students, but actually quelled potentially important debates and questions that contradicted the incorrect assumptions, even when those debates and questions could have potentially helped students learn the material.

Educators and researchers have increasingly seen the value of learning that is largely student-directed (Winne 2004, Osborn 2005, McNeil et al 2008). Virtual instruction techniques in particular tend to be inherently immersive and can therefore help students develop critical thinking skills by encouraging them to make their own educational choices (Johnson and Levine 2008; Chambers et al 2008).

Several recent studies have demonstrated the relationship between students’ ability to learn and the environment in which they are taught (see Gándara, Rumberger, Maxwell-Jolly, and Callahan 2003; Niles, Reynolds, and Nagasawa 2006; McNeil, Coppola, Radigan, and Heilig 2008; Metz 2008; Plank, Bradshaw, and Young 2009). For example, Griffen and Wohlstetter (2001) have used data from a study of charter schools to highlight the importance of student accountability in ensuring good learning outcomes. The Free World U system provides an environment that encourages student accountability and thereby facilitates learning.

Despite this fact, recent studies have also shown that alternative education programs, including programs like the one Free World U system, do not automatically avoid all the problems inherent in traditional classroom settings (Zhao, Lei, Yan, Lai, and Tan 2005; Bomotti, Ginsberg, and Cobb 1999; see also Natriello 2005). The construction of an online learning program like the one Free World U has created requires a sound foundation in research. Extensive testing is necessary to ensure that it provides students with the best possible educational environment.

The Free World U system of incremental, cumulative projects allows students to meet multiple small goals while pursuing a larger end-goal. Glassman and Whaley (2000) argue that by breaking long-term projects into incremental phases, students focus on the educational process itself rather than on the particular assignment on which they are currently working.

The questions used in the Free World U system are devised to address any of the six levels of Bloom's taxonomy: knowledge, understanding, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. Whereas, Bloom (1956) found that over 95% of the test questions that students encounter in traditional teaching settings require them to think only at the lowest possible intellectual level: the recall of information.

Studies have demonstrated the importance of good foundational knowledge in ensuring high achievement in education (see Bodovski and Farkas 2007). In 2005, the Nation’s Report Card for science reported that 39 percent of fourth graders scored in the basic achievement level while only 25 percent and 2 percent scored in the proficient and advanced achievement levels, respectively. The eighth grade scores were slightly lower with 30 percent, 24 percent, and 3 percent scoring at each respective level of achievement. This report defined basic achievement as “partial mastery of prerequisite knowledge and skills that are fundamental for proficient work at a given grade.” U.S. students have shown this lack of mastery for several years now (Education 2008).

Educational literature is also rife with studies outlining the failures of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education in the United States (Stone 1996, Gagnon 2006, Ma 2006, 2009). The literature documents students' less-than-enthusiastic attitudes concerning these subjects (Ma and Xu 2004). Since many researchers, scholars, and educators disagree on precisely what is wrong, there is equally little consensus on the causes of these failures. Some suggested causes include:

STEM subjects have traditionally been viewed as too difficult or too time-consuming for students to learn them effectively (Weinburgh 1998). However, this foundational content is crucial to students’ continued success in education. The learning of new material requires mastery of previous material, and this is especially true for STEM. This step-by-step process is the method by which students master any subject, yet the process itself presents students with challenges that have not been adequately addressed in the U.S. educational system. Since each new learning objective builds upon previous objectives, students who fail to master previous content find themselves unable to learn new content. Settings that prioritize coverage of material over mastery of material thus provide no assurance that students will build a solid foundation for future learning. Consequently, as students cover more and more material, their overall comprehension of the subject matter weakens.

While the above factors are certainly worthy of investigation, educational research and the American educational system would be better served by an increased understanding of the processes by which all students learn, regardless of their population, background, or environment (Heynemann 2005, Cooper 2007).

Free World U has begun a five-year investigation to seek new methods for doing things well, rather than focusing on what has been done poorly. The following outlines the results of the first year of the evaluation. The study builds on the assumption that deficits displayed by U.S. students result from gaps in the foundational content required for mastery of advanced topics. Free World U, a public non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, offers Internet-based software as the solution to this problem. The system is designed to provide education that can be easily and quickly assimilated by presenting information in an engaging manner that is highly customized to each student’s needs. To test the effectiveness of the Free World U system, students were selected to participate in one of three research groups: one that studies curriculum through the Free World U system, one that studies the same curriculum in a classroom, and one that receives no instruction at all in the chosen subject matter. All students were administered a series of tests to gauge how quickly and thoroughly they mastered the learned content, as well as the degree to which this mode of instruction helped them develop critical thinking skills.

Camburn and Barnes (2004) point out that there is no single measure that can capture the efficacy of a particular educational program or project with 100% accuracy. Therefore, several measures to test the program’s success were included. Informal surveys suggest that students learn faster, retain more information, and build better critical thinking skills through the Free World U system. The research conducted sought to gain additional evidence using systematic studies to verify these conclusions. Specifically, this project tested the following hypotheses across all subjects:

H1:	Students exposed to the Free World U system will learn material faster than will students who are exposed only to traditional teaching methods.
H2:	Students exposed to the Free World U system will retain more material than will students who are exposed only to traditional teaching methods.
H3:	Students exposed to the Free World U system will demonstrate more critical thinking skills than will students who are exposed only to traditional teaching methods.

Three hundred students in each of three grades -- second, seventh, and eleventh -- were selected to participate in the evaluation. In order to test the efficacy of the Free World U program, we compared a group of Free World U participants (group 1) with two groups of students (groups 2 and 3) from school districts in 24 states and homeschoolers worldwide. Free World U has about 20,000 registrants in 98 countries although primarily in the US because we lead the world in Internet activity.

A pre-test on the subject matter taught during the course of the study was administered to all students. The California Achievement Test, published by McGraw-Hill, was chosen to serve as the model for the construction of the pretest for each grade level. All students were also administered a version patterned after the Cornell Critical Thinking Test. These two pre-tests established a baseline against which improvements in students’ skills and knowledge were measured.

To test the first hypothesis, that students exposed to the Free World U system learn faster than students using traditional methods, the post test was re-administered at the end of each of the four-week periods of the study. This provided a time-series measure gauging the speed of students’ learning. Group 3 served as a control group to guard against any internal validity confounds that might result from students taking the test repeatedly. The second hypothesis, that students exposed to the Free World U system learn materials better, was tested using comparisons of final scores. Scores from a second round of the critical thinking test, also administered at the end of the four-week period, allowed for testing of the third hypothesis, that students exposed to the Free World U system develop more critical thinking skills.

Group 1 Free World U Group 2 Traditional Teaching Group 3 Control Total Demographics Sex (%) Male Female 46 54 49 51 55 45 50 50 Race/Ethnicity (%) Caucasian Black Hispanic/Latino Asian Other 44 12 28 16 1 40 16 32 12 1 36 21 19 23 1 40 16 26 17 3 Age (mean) 11.5 11.8 11.9 11.7 Grade Level 2nd Grade 100 100 100 7th Grade 100 100 100 11th Grade 100 100 100 N 300 300 300 900 Table 1. Characteristics of the Sample.

In order to estimate the effect of the Free World U program on student learning outcomes, we compared the average change in test scores between pre-test and post-test for group 1 with the average change in test scores for groups 2 and 3 combined. Differences between pre-test and post-test were standardized on a scale of 0 to 100. All analyses were conducted using Stata SE Version 9.2 for Windows (StataCorp, College Station, TX 2007).

In order to ensure that the effect of Free World U is not confounded with the effects of demographic variables, we examined the composition of the groups with regard to race, gender and age. One can see in Table 1 that the three groups differ very little with respect to gender and age. The racial composition of groups 1 and 2 are also similar. However, the racial composition of group 3 is somewhat different than the racial composition of groups 1 and 2.

Recall that in the present analysis, groups 2 and 3 were combined. Thus, for the purposes of the present analysis, what matters is whether the attributes of group 1 differ significantly from the attributes of groups 2 and 3 combined. In this regard, demographic differences between groups are not significant. The racial composition of group 1 is not significantly different than the racial composition of groups 2 and 3 combined (χ2=7.70, p=0.10). Group 1 is also not significantly different from groups 2/3 in terms of gender (χ2=2.88, p=0.09).

The main findings are presented in Figure 1. Figure 1 shows average changes in scores on the pretest and posttest, organized by grade and by group. In each grade, and on both tests, improvement was dramatically higher among students who participated in the Free World U program than among students in the two comparison groups. For example, among second-graders, Free World U participants scored an average of about 27 points higher than members of the comparison group on the Cornell Critical Thinking Test. In every case, the differences between the average scores of the Free World U group and the average scores of other two groups are highly statistically significant.

Note also how the Free World U program appears to affect the relative decline in improvement observed between second-graders and seventh/eleventh-graders. Among students who did not participate in Free World U, the seventh and eleventh graders tended to show less improvement than the second-graders. For example, among students in groups 2 and 3, performance on the California Achievement Test improved by about 61 points in second-grade, and by about 49 points in seventh and eleventh grades. In the same groups, performance on the critical thinking test also appeared to slow from an average of 49 points in second grade to an average of about 37 points in seventh and eleventh grades.

The numbers on improvement among students participating in Free World U tell a different story. The gap in improvement between Free World U participants in seventh/eleventh grade and second grade was narrower than the gap observed among their counterparts in the other groups. In fact, the difference in performance between Free World U participants in seventh and eleventh grades and Free World U participants in seventh grade was statistically insignificant. The statistical interaction between grade level and group (FWU / others) is significant (p<.001) for both tests.

Three hypotheses were being tested. The first hypothesis was that Free World U students learned faster than their traditional counterparts. The Free World U students were limited to studying only one hour per day during the month of testing. On the average, the control group spent approximately seven hours per day studying the same material. The speed of learning was the most striking finding. Without this handicap, we would expect to see a more dramatic improvement in the learning pattern.

Free World U students were interviewed regarding the different types of learning that they engaged in when they were not sitting at their computers. Contrary to the popular belief, they were active in one or more of the 1300 homeschooling groups throughout the United States and tended to use the real world as their classrooms. One of the most common activities was to interview people in all walks of life and create informal apprenticeships. They tended to have many hobbies and worked with adults in their communities on projects such as inventions, enterprises, and scientific exploration. They widely expressed the opinion that these activities were more meaningful than the canned laboratory experiments in traditional schools.

The findings of this first year of our five-year study are encouraging. They suggest that not only are students using the Free World U system learning faster than students not using the Free World U system, they are also learning better. Differences in pre- and post- test scores were continually higher for students using the FWU system and continued to increase over time compared to students not using the FWU system. Students using the Free World U system also developed greater critical thinking skills than other students, and their skills continued to improve over each time period, while other students’ skills remained level after week 12. These results support our three hypotheses that students using the Free World U system learn faster, better, and develop greater critical thinking skills.

Parents and policy makers alike are eager to learn what effect, if any, technology has on student learning (O’Dwyer, Russell, and Bebell 2004). This study contributes to the growing body of literature that is beginning to address this timely and important question. Accurately measuring the effects of a specific educational technology on student learning has traditionally been difficult, because so many other aspects of a classroom environment—-teachers, administration, peers, and classroom facilities, for example-—also affect a student’s ability to master the material (Lewis et al. 2003). This study has avoided those problems because Free World U’s educational programs exist entirely independent of a classroom setting. Additionally, researchers and educators have frequently criticized online learning programs for failing to base their development upon a sound foundation of research (McCombs and Vakili 2005). This study offers a sound empirical basis for an online learning program.

The Free World U system is economical, costing far less than traditional methods. Given this encouraging initial evidence of the effectiveness of the system, it may provide one avenue for reducing the burden of teachers and better equipping U.S. students to enter the job market, while saving schools money. This process will reduce the need for involved lesson plans that “teach to the test” and will also level the playing field for underperforming schools by giving students the resources to fill in the gaps in their education themselves (Gandara et al 2003). More generally, type and quality of education have been linked to community service participation, civic skills, and political tolerance (Belfield 2004; and Ramirez, Luo, Schofer, and Meyer 2006). Additionally, the out-of-classroom learning that characterizes the Free World U system has been linked to other benefits, such as the development of social competence, along with better grades within the classroom (Mahoney, Parente, and Lord 2007; Chatterji 2005; and Niles, Reynolds, and Nagasawa 2006).

The current data on the effectiveness of the Free World U system is encouraging. Data will continue to be collected and analyzed every year of this five-year study. Experimental design and data collection methods will be improved each year based on the prior year's experience. Every day our children become more technologically advanced. We should not ignore evidence suggesting that systems such as Free World U that are utilizing the skills our children are developing naturally are a better way to teach them skills and subjects they are failing in the traditional classroom. Education worldwide is a multi-trillion dollar per year industry that is poised to undergo a major upheaval because the delivery system cost has now dropped precipitously. This should have a major impact on all aspects of society.

References Cited