That’s how important the personal relationship is in distance learning

It depends on the relationship. Study shows how important personal relationships are in distance learning.

Teaching methods that enable personal contact and maintain relationships have proven to be particularly beneficial for students' learning success in distance learning.
This is the result of a study by scientists from the Hector Institute for Empirical Educational Research at the University of Tübingen and the Leibniz Institute for Knowledge Media.
They examined how teachers organized distance learning during the first school closure phase in early summer 2020 due to the corona pandemic and how the quality of this teaching was perceived by students and their parents. It turned out that, for example, video meetings or personal meetings between the teacher and individual students contributed the most to the quality of teaching and the enjoyment of learning or the willingness to make an effort.
“The great need of students for personal contact with the teacher was also clearly reflected in another result of the study: teachers’ self-made videos were rated best ,” explains educational researcher Ann-Kathrin Jaekel.
Students and their parents apparently do not value a perfectly designed video. “They would rather see their own teacher and have the feeling that someone has made a real effort for us,” adds Jaekel. However, learning videos from third-party providers on platforms such as YouTube or Planet Schule had no relevant impact on the quality of teaching. The results were published in the journal AERA Open .
Around 3,200 students, 1,700 parents and 300 teachers from secondary schools in Baden-Württemberg took part in the study.
The study examined how lessons in the subjects of German, mathematics and English were specifically designed, for example with video meetings, group work, online presentations or learning videos, and which of these methods parents and students found to be particularly helpful for learning at a distance. For example, questions were asked about how the structure of the lesson, the feedback from the teacher or the design of the exercise phases were perceived. Finally, it was examined how the teaching methods were related, for example, to the joy of learning, willingness to make an effort or to the class community experienced. The results showed that the teachers used a wide range of design options and that these depended heavily on the respective subject and the teacher.
While video meetings or meetings with individual students were used across all subjects, mathematics teachers increasingly used self-produced learning videos. In the subjects German and English, however, group work played a larger role. Overall, formats were considered to be particularly effective for learning if they enabled a personal relationship with the teacher or classmates and promoted social interaction. Regular personal exchange with the teacher and classmates is therefore particularly important in distance learning. “However, it is also clear that this sometimes means a lot of effort for teachers. “You should give your students the opportunity for personal exchange regularly and reliably ,” advises Ann-Kathrin Jaekel. “Especially with regard to the results of the learning videos, the study also provides us with interesting starting points for usefully supplementing the face-to-face teaching that is now taking place again with digital components. Certain elements of digital teaching definitely have future potential,” adds Richard Göllner, Professor of Educational Effectiveness and Educational Trajectories at the Hector Institute.

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Original publication:

Jaekel, A.-K., Scheiter, K., & Göllner, R. (2021). Distance Teaching During the COVID-19 Crisis: Social Connectedness Matters Most for Teaching Quality and Students' Learning. AERA Open . https://doi.org/10.1177/23328584211052050

Source: German Health Portal
Article image: Pexels