911勛圖

Grant program: Exploring Well-being in Learning Environments: An Integrated Seminar Series and Grants Program

Grant recipient: Suzanna Crage, Department of Sociology and Anthropology

Project team: Ece Arslan, research assistant

Timeframe: January 2021 to July 2021

Funding: $4,593

Courses addressed: 

• SA 257 ��� Understanding Quantitative Research in Sociology and Anthropology
• SA 355 ��� Quantitative Methods
  

Final report: View Suzanna Crage's final report (PDF)

Description: This project explores ways of building a sense of community in a class, focusing on instructor immediacy and its potential impact on student well-being. Many scholars have found that a sense of community in online classes improves students��� satisfaction with their experience and their sense of perceived learning and achievement (see Trespalacios and Perkins 2016 for a discussion of the literature). It may or may not affect externally evaluated student learning.

I am interested in how feeling a sense of community is related to two components of student well-being: overall well-being and a sense of anxiety about the class. Some research has found that increased interaction and sense of community can decrease student anxiety about stressful classes (e.g., Harris et al 2020); I want to investigate whether a stronger sense of class community is also related to overall student well-being.

I will evaluate the impact of offering out-of-class ���Ask Me Anything��� sessions, where students engage with the professor and each other about topics unrelated to the course. I will also compare outcomes between two courses that are similar in topic and structure, except one is taught remotely (online but with synchronous class meetings) and the other is a completely asynchronous online course.

References:

Cho, Jeff and Carrie Demmans Epp. 2019. ���Improving the Classroom Community Scale: Toward a Short-Form of the CCS.��� Presented at the American Educational Research Association (AERA) Annual Meeting at Toronto, Canada.

Harris, Breanna N. Pumtiwitt C. McCarthy, April M. Wright, Heidi Schutz, Kate S. Boersma. 2020. ���From panic to pedagogy: Using online active learning to promote inclusive instruction in ecology and evolutionary biology courses and beyond.��� Ecology and Evolution 10 (22): 12581-12612.

Trespalacios, Jesus and Ross Perkins. 2016. ���Sense of Community, Perceived Learning, and Achievement Relationships in an Online Graduate Course.��� Turkish Online Journal of Distance Education-TOJDE 17(3): 31-49.

Questions addressed:

• What is the impact of the Ask Me Anything sessions on students��� sense of well-being and class community?
• How important as community-building course components do students rate Ask Me Anything sessions compared to components like small-group activities and discussion forums, and course-wide discussion forums?
• Do these vary between classes with and without synchronous class meetings?

Knowledge sharing: I have been discussing this project with colleagues in informal ways, through conversations, and as part of a department workshop on remote teaching that I organized in August 2020. I am also incorporating what I have learned in current university projects.

I plan to submit a paper for presentation at the 2022 Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education Annual Conference, and other venues as appropriate.

Keywords: Instructor presence; Student well-being. Sense of community; Group activities; Group discussions; Student-teacher interaction; Online instruction; Online course design; Class engagement