Elsevier

Computers & Education

Volume 157, November 2020, 103956
Computers & Education

Effects of teacher role on student engagement in WeChat-Based online discussion learning

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2020.103956Get rights and content

Highlights

  • We examined the effects of teacher role on student engagement in online discussion.

  • Content analysis and questionnaires are used to evaluate student engagement.

  • Behavioral and cognitive engagement are higher in groups with teacher facilitation.

  • Teacher's role has no significant impact on student emotional engagement.

Abstract

The online discussion format has proven itself to be useful for promoting student collaboration and for accomplishing better learning outcomes. As a popular instant message software in China, WeChat has been commonly adopted for supporting academic group discussions. Many studies have explored how teacher facilitation affects students' learning performance in the synchronous or asynchronous discussion settings. However, the conclusions are not consistent and there is relative less research about the effects of teacher role on student engagement in the context of online discussion using the semi-synchronous tool-WeChat. This study began by identifying three dimensions of student engagement: behavioral engagement, cognitive engagement, and emotional engagement. A quasi-experiment was then conducted to compare student engagement among experiment groups (with teacher facilitation) and control groups (without teacher facilitation). A total of 46 college students were divided into eight groups and asked to discuss two specific topic tasks. To evaluate participants' behavioral and cognitive engagement, this study used a more objective data analysis method by applying content analysis rather than only based on surveys. Participants were required to complete a questionnaire to report their emotional engagement. The results show the behavioral and cognitive engagement of the experimental group with teacher facilitation were significantly higher than that of the control group without teacher facilitation. However, there was no significant effect of teacher facilitation on participants’ emotional engagement in the experimental group. It is also found that the emerging student leaders show similar positive effects of teacher facilitation towards improving behavioral and cognitive engagement. Future studies about the moderating effects of teaching experience and student leaders are also needed.

Introduction

Online education is currently breaking down geographical barriers and providing students with ubiquitous learning opportunities (Shukor, Tasir, Meijden, & Harun, 2014), adopted by higher education institutions globally. It has the potential to make learning processes more student-centric (Dwivedi, Dwivedi, Bobek, & Sternad Zabukovšek, 2019) and to improve learning on cognitive, meta-cognitive, affective-motivational, and social aspects (Johnson & Johnson, 2009). However, the online learning context is also complex, where learners are easy to get distracted and fail to self-regulate (Zimmerman, 2002). Since there is no guarantee of active learning and expected outcomes as a result of generally using technology (Bond, Buntins, Bedenlier, Zawacki-Richter, & Kerres, 2020), researchers are investigating the effectiveness of online learning (Kovanović et al., 2016, pp. 269–272; Soffer & Cohen, 2019) and figuring out the methods to enhance learning achievement, such as teacher's support (Dwivedi et al., 2019; Kahu, 2013; van Leeuwen, Janssen, Erkens, & Brekelmans, 2013). At present, some scholars no longer use the knowledge-based examination to assess student academic performance, and instead, they analyze “student engagement” during the online learning process (Riordan, Millard, & Schulz, 2016).

As one of the most common forms of online learning, online discussion has been shown to support student social interaction as well as academic development (Schindler, Burkholder, Morad, & Marsh, 2017; Schneider & Preckel, 2017). According to the results of meta-analyses (e.g., Chen, Wang, Kirschner, & Tsai, 2018; Johnson & Johnson, 2009), the learners studying in small groups would be more likely to achieve higher learning outcomes than students learning individually. However, if students exhibit low engagement during the discussion, the above advantages would be less apparent (Ding, Kim, & Orey, 2017). Hara, Bonk, and Angeli (2000) reviewed studies about the effects of online discussion and recognized that low student engagement had become a common phenomenon. Similarly, Dwivedi et al. (2019) have also referred that a lack of social presence results in unsatisfied student engagement and even dropout from online groups.

Teacher's involvement has been highly recognized in both K-12 (Ingulfsen, Furberg, & Strømme, 2018; van Leeuwen et al., 2013; van Leeuwen & Janssen, 2019) and higher education context (Schwarz & Asterhan, 2011; Shoepe et al., 2020). As for online discussion, teacher's support is also critical guidance to improve the quality of posted messages in learning management systems (LMS) (e.g., Joksimović et al., 2015a), student interaction (e.g., Zhu, 2006) and students' understanding of learning resources (e.g., Ingulfsen et al., 2018). However, little has been known about how teacher's role influences student engagement in online group discussion, based on semi-synchronous platforms, such as WeChat. Since WeChat-based online learning is commonly adopted in China, it is necessary to explore the effects of the teacher role (i.e., facilitation and non-facilitation) on student engagement in online group discussion.

Section snippets

Literature review

Student engagement is a hot topic among governments, higher education institutes, researchers and instructors (Kahu, 2013). It has been regarded as the proxy of educational quality and is positively related to student's persistence, satisfaction, learning gains and degree completion (Kuh, 2001; 2009a; 2009b). While all acknowledge it is crucial, there is disagreement about the exact nature and the definition of this meta-construct (Fredricks, Blumenfeld, & Paris, 2004). Furthermore, teacher

Participants

Participants were 46 first-year (mean age 18–19) undergraduate students (9 males, 37 females) enrolled in the Developmental Psychology course at a university in Beijing, China. All these participants have their own smartphone and WeChat account, and are familiar with how to use WeChat to discuss with others. Developmental Psychology is a general-knowledge and compulsory course for the students who are major in education. The nature of the course also makes it a representative sample of liberal

Preliminary analysis of the valid messages from each group

We conducted descriptive statistics analysis of the eight groups across two discussion tasks and calculated the total number of valid messages (the messages related to the task topic) made in each group, as shown in Table 4.

Across two tasks, the G1-G4 groups where the teacher facilitated discussion displayed a higher number of valid messages than groups without teacher facilitating, G5-G8. According to the data, the least valid messages made by an individual (only one student) was two, while

Discussion

The current study explores how teacher role influences student engagement in WeChat-based semi-synchronous discussions. According to data, this study found that students with teacher facilitation showed significantly higher behavioral and cognitive engagement than their counterpart, but there is no significant difference among experiment and control groups regarding emotional engagement. The following sections further explain the results.

Studies have demonstrated the affordance of social media

Conclusion

Researchers hold different perspectives on how teacher's role affects student engagement in a semi-synchronous online discussion setting using WeChat. To explore this question, this study designed a quasi-experiment, in which the students were required to have group discussions with or without teacher facilitation. Content analysis method was adopted to evaluate behavioral engagement and cognitive engagement, whereas the questionnaire was used to evaluate emotional engagement.

The results showed

Declaration of competing interest

None.

Acknowledgements

None.

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