Care Tactics: The Role of Perceived Teacher Care in Students' Experiences in Secondary School Online Courses

Abstract

Excellent teachers care deeply about their students. One area practitioners need to better understand, and about which skeptics of the efficacy of online learning are outspoken, is the role and nature of teacher-student relationships in the online class (Baker, 2010). In this study, the essence of that relationship is understood through Noddings’ Ethic of Care (Noddings, 2003). This study explored the notion of care to better understand teacher-student relationships in courses at the secondary level (grades 9-12) and to find ways to leverage and determine the value of those interactions in online learning environments. This study used path analysis to examine the relationship between teacher behaviors in online secondary classes and students’ perceptions of being cared for and ultimately the influence of that sense of care on cognitive (student reported learning), conative (self- motivation) and affective (satisfaction) learner outcomes. The site for the study was the Global Online Academy (GOA), a not-for-profit consortium of more than 60 schools from around the world founded in 2011 to address the gap in high-quality, student-centered courses that its ten founding schools identified in the field of online learning. Independent sample t-tests showed significant differences between male and female students with females scoring higher in motivation and course grades. One-way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) revealed significant differences between the students at different grade levels. Sophomores had higher scores on motivation, satisfaction and reported learning. The conglomerate (summative) variables for Social Presence, Care, Motivation and Satisfaction were used in the first model tested and a second model tested each of the three factors associated with teaching presence separately. All elements of the path model yielded significant results suggesting that teaching presence is highly correlated with care, and care is moderately to highly related to the variables that approximate the three dimensions of learning: affective (satisfaction), conative (motivation), and cognitive (reported learning). A significant finding is that any single sub-scale of the teaching presence scale does not predict a student’s feeling of being cared for as much as the conglomerate scale—affirming the complex nature of care in education. This study has implications for in-service and pre-service online educators along with policy makers.