Date of Conferral

10-16-2025

Degree

Ph.D.

School

Education

Advisor

Denise Uehara

Abstract

Limited research has been conducted about the potential influence of high-speed broadband infrastructure availability in rural and urban communities on high school academic outcome measures in Washington state. Guided by Siemens’s theory of connectivism and van Dijk’s digital divide theory, the purpose of this quasi-experimental, causal-comparative, quantitative study was to determine whether significant differences in high school academic performance, measured by graduation rates and standardized test scores, exist between urban and rural communities with and without access to high-speed broadband internet infrastructure in Washington state. Three research questions were developed to examine differences in graduation rates, 10th-grade English Language Arts and Mathematics scores, and 11th-grade science scores across rural and urban schools with and without broadband availability. Publicly available school-level data from the 2022–2023 academic year were analyzed using separate one-way ANOVAs. The sample included 374 schools for graduation rates, 437 for ELA, 358 for Math, and 421 for science scores. Statistically significant differences in graduation rates were found based on broadband availability (p = .006), locale (p = .041), and their interaction (p = .015), with rural schools and those with broadband access showing higher graduation rates. No significant differences were found for standardized test scores. These results suggest broadband infrastructure may be more closely linked to graduation outcomes than test performance in the state of Washington. Implications for positive social change include informing state-level broadband expansion efforts to improve graduation outcomes, especially in underserved communities, and giving these students better opportunities.

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