Distance Teaching During the COVID-19 Crisis: Social Connectedness Matters Most for Teaching Quality and Students’ Learning

Abstract

In spring 2020, school closures were enacted to slow the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. Students and teachers faced the challenge of organizing digital teaching and learning without sufficient time to prepare. In this study, we investigated how teachers implemented teaching from a distance and how these different implementations were associated with students’ and parents’ perceptions of teaching quality and students’ social involvement, enjoyment of learning, academic effort, and perceived competence. To this end, we examined data from 277 teachers, 3,159 students in Grades 5 to 10, and 1,688 parents who rated classes in mathematics, German language arts, and English as a foreign language during the school closures. The results showed that teachers’ implementations of distance teaching varied greatly. Teaching methods enabling social connectedness (e.g., video meetings, learning videos created by the teacher) revealed the most consistent positive associations with students’ and parents’ teaching quality ratings and students’ learning experiences.

Predictors of Central Student Learning Outcomes in Times of COVID-19: Students’, Parents’, and Teachers’ Perspectives During School Closure in 2020—A Multiple Informant Relative Weight Analysis

“…Klieme (2020), Voss and Wittwer (2020), and Meyer (2020) argued on the basis of theoretical considerations that the three constructs of instructional quality also represent important aspects of high-quality in distance education. Initial empirical work on distance education (Frohn, 2022;Jaekel et al, 2021;Steinmayr et al, 2021) supports these assumptions with both quantitative and qualitative data. For instance, Jaekel et al (2021) found that teaching methods enabling social connectedness revealed positive associations with students' and parents' ratings of instructional quality and students' learning experiences during distance learning.…”

“…Initial empirical work on distance education (Frohn, 2022;Jaekel et al, 2021;Steinmayr et al, 2021) supports these assumptions with both quantitative and qualitative data. For instance, Jaekel et al (2021) found that teaching methods enabling social connectedness revealed positive associations with students' and parents' ratings of instructional quality and students' learning experiences during distance learning. Finally, Steinmayr et al (2021) found that distance teaching activities that corresponded with dimensions of teaching quality (e.g., feedback, teacher-child-communication) were comparatively strongly correlated with students' motivation and learning progress during the school lockdown for both elementary and secondary school students.…”

“…However, intra-class correlation (ICC) values can be assumed to be low in the case of distance learning since classes have been disbanded and learning is more dependent on individual characteristics and home conditions. Findings from studies on distance learning point to rather low values below 10% (e.g., Jaekel et al, 2021). In addition, prior research from regular schooling shows that for motivational outcomes ICC values are low anyway (e.g., Kunter et al, 2005).…”

Graduating during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Digital Media Practices and Learning Spaces among Pupils Taking Their School-Leaving Exams

“…Helm et al [35] have found that the quality of learning and teaching during remote learning is largely dependent on the performance of individual teachers, because a schoolwide conceptualization of distance education was often lacking, due to the suddenness of the school closures. Jaekel et al [36] have suggested that interactive student-teacher and student-student connectedness is most important for instructional quality and student learning in remote learning. Online group work can create an interactive social group context, which is otherwise compromised by social distancing.…”

Teaching Quality of Mathematics Lessons during Online Education in Covid-19 Pandemic Process from Students’ Perspectives

“…Then it matters whether the teacher uses the lecture format or the student-centered instruction. However, organizing the lessons in this way does not mean that student outcomes will be predicted correctly (Jaekel et al, 2021).…”