| The purpose of this study was to examine whether or not a change in religiosity would occur in undergraduate students at a West Coast Christian university as a result of their participation in an online Christian worldview course. Twenty-six undergraduate students participated in this pretest posttest quasi-experimental study which employed the Shepherd Scale (Bassett, Sadler, Kobischen, Skiff, Merrill, Atwater, & Livermore, 1981) and the Religiosity Measure (Rohrbaugh & Jessor, 1975).The findings indicated that students self-reported positive change in two areas: Belief component and Christian walk component. Belief component indicated p = .03, with a post hoc statistical power of .45 and an effect size of 0.36; Christian walk component indicated p = .01 with a post hoc statistical power of 0.61 and an effect size of 0.42. Ritual, consequential, theological, and experiential religiosity did not show statistical significance since p = .29, .30, .08, and .07 respectively. However, the effect sizes were 0.11, 0.10, 0.27, and 0.30 respectively, which suggests that a small negative effect occurred in the area of ritual religiosity, a small positive effect occurred in the area of consequential religiosity, and a medium effect occurred in the areas of both theological and experiential religiosity. The results of this study suggest that online Christian education may affect an increase in religiosity, which not only validates the mission of Christian colleges and universities to foster Christian growth in their student body but also validates the time, effort, and training that colleges and universities invest in their faculty and staff to provide online Christian education.;Keywords: Religiosity, online education, undergraduate, education, Christian worldview... |
