Teacher Interaction Stephen Lehman, Douglas F. Kauffman, Mary Jane White, Christy A.
Horn, Roger H. Bruning Setting The Course A Writing Roadtrip, an introductory high school composition course produced by the CLASS project, was selected because it provided an opportunity for teachers and students to communicate at a personal level. The course was designed to teach basic composition skills to students with limited writing background. Divided into seven sections (Figure 1)—each focusing on different genres such as short stories, essays, and speech writing—the course provided multiple writing opportunities and required a number of revisions for completion of the course.
Figure 1. Splash screen of the beginning composition course A Writing Roadtrip. Used with permission. Copyright © 1998, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, Board of Regents. All communication between students and the online teacher was completed by e-mail, including assignments, revisions, questions, and feedback from the teacher. Additionally, students could interact with other students through chat rooms, electronic bulletin boards, and e-mail. Because the course was not yet available for course credit, students were paid for their participation. The Setting Students completed all work in a computer laboratory configured by the research team to simulate a naturalistic setting such as a library or community center. The lab contained eight computer stations equipped with 200MHz and 300MHz PC computers loaded with the software necessary to complete the course. Students needed to simply turn on their computer and log onto the course. The Teacher The teacher assigned to teach the composition course had five years of experience teaching high school special education in a local high school but no prior experience teaching Web-based courses. The research team trained the teacher to interact with students in a prescribed manner by providing the theoretical rationale as well as multiple examples of motivation-building and personal-investment enhancements. The teacher was instructed to interact with students following the parameters laid out in the training session. Because scripted responses could not be used in this naturalistic setting, messages were reviewed for fidelity to treatment. Fidelity to treatment analysis indicated that the teacher’s interaction with students reliably represented the appropriate condition. This analysis is discussed in greater detail in the Procedures subsection. Lab Monitors Four graduate assistants acted as computer lab monitors. At least one monitor was present at all times to assist participants with technology-related questions and to observe participants’ interaction in the course. Lab monitors recorded behavioral observations of each participant and daily reflections. Information regarding each student’s experimental condition was available to lab monitors if they chose to access it. To ensure that the online teacher was the primary source of interaction, lab monitors were instructed to restrict their interaction with the students as much as possible because of the potential impact of their relationship with the student on engagement. When students requested help from the lab monitors, lab monitors instructed the student to call the technology help line or e-mail their teacher. In two notable cases, lab monitors did intervene when a student became excessively frustrated. Procedures Students worked a total of seven weeks in the course, four weeks in their respective experimental condition and the final three weeks in which all students were moved to the motivating and personally invested condition. This functionally divided the experiment into two phases, an experimental (data gathering) phase and a postexperimental phase. Prior to the experimental phase students were oriented to the courses and to the expectations of participation in the experiment. Students’ overall understanding was that their role was to provide information regarding the course functionality to course developers. The orientation consisted of a one-hour meeting in which students were introduced to the lab monitors. They were told that their commitment was for approximately 50 hours of work over the summer. Additionally, they were informed that they would be paid at the end of the experiment, but were free to leave at any time with their pay prorated based on the number of hours they worked. Students were told that the researchers were more interested in their best work than in their completion of the course. These instructions were given to minimize possible influences related to time constraints. Students were asked to schedule two-hour shifts each day of the week, though some minor adjustments were made throughout the summer, students for the most part kept their initially scheduled hours. On arrival each day, students completed a timesheet and logged on to their course. During the experimental phase, students worked through the writing course at their own pace and received messages from the teacher consistent with the experimental condition to which they were assigned. All e-mail correspondence was gathered and stored in a relational database for organizing, sorting, and storing. To ensure that students received messages consistent with their condition, a fidelity to treatment analysis was conducted to confirm that the teacher had in fact delivered e-mails consistent with the students’ experimental condition. After reviewing the teacher training materials, two independent raters blind to the experimental condition of the students rated a random sample of 72 teacher-to-student e-mails. Using a 3-point Likert scale, they judged the messages on two dimensions:
Reliabilities were r = .42 for ratings on the motivation-building dimension and r = .71 for ratings on the caring/personal-investment dimension. Results showed that the teacher’s e-mails were consistent with the condition in which the students were placed (Figure 2). Messages from the motivation-building conditions received higher motivation-building ratings, F(1, 68) = 17.31, p <.01, while messages from the personal-investment conditions received higher personal-investment ratings F(1, 68) = 26.44, p<.01. Additionally an interaction was observed between motivation building and personal investment. Specifically, e-mails high in motivation-building content were rated as more invested/caring than those low in motivation-building content. In addition to ratings of personal investment and motivation building, teacher messages were also rated on the dimensions of content-related feedback and procedural feedback. Motivation-building e-mails contained more content-related feedback than personal-investment e-mails, F(1, 68) = 6.50, p = .01.
Figure 2. Ratings of motivation-building and personal-investment content of teacher e-mails to students. After experiencing four weeks of teacher–student communication consistent with the experimental conditions, all students were shifted to the motivating and personally invested professional condition where they stayed for the remainder of the experiment. Based on our observations that there were in fact positive effects for both motivation-building and personal-investment statements, we provided both types of interaction to ensure that all students had as positive an experience as possible. Students were debriefed on their final day of working in the course and completed a survey designed to elicit information regarding their experiences in the course and perceptions of the teacher. Regarding the course, students were asked to rate how much they learned, whether the material was important to them, and how much they liked the course. Questions regarding the teacher probed student perceptions of how motivating and caring they believed the teacher to be. Copyright © 2001, ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education). All rights reserved. | |||
