A truism of online instruction is that students who do not perceive
the instructor as accessible and committed to their learning drop out or end
the semester dissatisfied. Cho & Cho look
at how instructor scaffolding works through classroom goal structures to
increase academic engagement. Academic engagement consists of emotional and
behavioral engagement, or in other words, enthusiasm and interest on the one
hand, and effort and involvement, on the other.
Studies have connected academic engagement to achievement, attendance
and retention. Thus, it is obviously
vital in online contexts. Classroom goal structures refer to the
tacit message that students infer from instructional practices and policies about
the learning philosophy undergirding a course.
Mastery goal structure emphasizes
mastering skills, performance-approach goal structure compares achievement and
highlights superior efforts, and performance-avoidance goal structure avoids
comparison between learners and masks inadequacies.
Cho & Cho studied 158
college students recruited from ten sections of an online educational
psychology course. Instructors met in
weekly meetings to brainstorm on ways to improve instructional scaffolding
strategies, such as weekly emails with announcements and general feedback and
personalized feedback through email or gradebook comments. Instructors also pushed themselves to log in five
or more times a week and respond to at least 20% of student posts. Students were surveyed twice, on the 8th and
12th weeks of a 16-week semester, to explore how instructors scaffolded for
interaction, the goal structures that students perceived, and the engagement
versus disaffection in both behavioral and emotional categories. The instructor interaction data was collected
a few weeks earlier than the other data since the assumption was that students’
perception of this interaction drove the other constructs.
Cho & Cho hypothesized that scaffolding for interaction would
correlate with student perception of classroom goal structure and that this, in
turn, would correlate with emotional and behavioral engagement. These expectations were borne
out in the findings. Performance-avoidance goal structure correlated negatively.
Mastery goal structure had
positive effects on both emotional and behavioral engagement, while performance
approach goal structure had a positive effect on behavioral engagement but showed
no significant association with emotional. “This implies that students who
perceive their online class as being mastery-oriented tend to work hard and
experience enjoyment, but those who perceive their online class as being
performance-approach oriented tend to work hard, but not necessarily enjoy
their work” (p. 29).
Overall, I found this study helpful. I’m sure we knew intuitively that
frequent interaction plays an important role in online learning and
satisfaction, but this study explains what factors interact to create that
reality, particularly the mediating role of class goal structures. However, I was a little disappointed in the
types of interaction attested in the study.
This study primarily
looked at learner-instructor interaction while I expected to see strategies for engaging students
and stimulating them to interact with each other. In the discussion section, the researchers made
several recommendations about how online instructors can act as moderators and
facilitators of learner-learner interaction, but the course examples showed
little evidence of this. Of course, the
instructors’ scaffolding strategies were not under the control of the researchers.
Although not specifically focused on writing instruction, Cho
& Cho’s study should be relevant to anyone offering a distance class. True, the actual behaviors modeled by the
participating instructors were not that different from what most of us already
push ourselves to do, but it is good to have a handle on the theory behind what
we do, and the authors do offer some practical tips in the discussion section.
"Cho & Cho look at how instructor scaffolding works through classroom goal structures to increase academic engagement." As I read this sentence, and continued through the rest of the article, I had MOOCs in mind. I know MOOCs were not the subject of this study — not even tangentially — but that's the direction my head went as I read the term "scaffolded." We've used that term regularly throughout the semester and in other classes I've worked through, but one issue that I've started to struggle with relates to the Halesek et al. finding that instructors had very little control in the MOOC over the sequence attendees followed. I'm wondering if "scaffolding" might be a process that negates the non-sequential nature of hyptertext and the web. I wonder if our pedagogical theories might need to be revised to accommodate this affordance. Despite composition theory that seeks to break out of outdated modes, we often teach a writing process that, while recursive, is chronologically linear, meaning invention comes before drafting and drafting before revising. But is that model outdated? Can we take advantage of the nonlinear characteristics of the web to create spaces in which students determine their own scaffolding processes?
ReplyDeleteI think your question is an important one to ask. I have noticed in recent years that my composing strategy has become much less linear. I've often created an outline and then dumped in ideas in the appropriate spot. I find that this requires much more reading, as I have to go back again and again to see how the argument may have changed as different sections of the paper have changed. It has become a rather cyclical process.
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