Collaboration Practices and Attitudes for Students in Cyber Charter Classrooms

Posted by AACE Conferences on February 22 2015 at 2:04 a.m.


  • I am curious to know what kinds of interaction the charter school provides. I put my daughter into an online school due to social anxiety but we had to put her back into public school after one semester because the online program completely lacked interaction of any kind. She had trouble interacting with instructors - the system involved contacting them by email and often left her floundering for days. There was absolutely no peer interactions at all.

    Posted

    • Hi Julia, Thank you very much for virtually participating in our session. That is unfortunate that your daughter had that issue with interaction in the cyber charter school and challenges in a traditional brick-and-mortar public school. We did not do any sort of formal analysis on the interaction patterns of the school in relation to the students and were more interested in the student perspective of how they are communicating in their science classes. I know that one of the ways to alleviate the concerns of isolating learning experiences in distance education environments is to use many of the tools at our disposal to increase interaction and communication. One of the interesting results of our study was that students with social anxiety actually had a higher mean than average in seeing if they felt connected to other students in the class whereas students who experienced being bullied did not. This is certainly an avenue that could foster a productive research line. Thanks! Victoria

      Posted in reply to Julia Allen

    • Julia, I believe that Lisa Hasler Waters has done some work in this area in her dissertation (and has published a couple of articles focused on this) with a K12, Inc. program. Jered Borup has also published several studies on this topic focused on Mountain Heights Academy, formerly the Open High School of Utah (and I believe many of these are open access pieces). Finally, Abigail Hawkins did some work in this area - but it was with a supplemental program (i.e., the Utah eSchool) and I believe two of her three articles are open access.

      Posted in reply to Julia Allen

  • Could you provide more information regarding your survey instrument? Specifically, would you explain a bit more about how your instrument seeks to answer your research questions in regards to examining the types of collaboration and communication practices being utilized in the cyber charter school that you studied?

    Thank you.

    Posted

    • Hi Jillian, Thanks for your comment. Our survey instrument was modified from a survey instrument developed for use with preservice teachers for teaching in an online environment. We used a program known as PSU REDCap to distribute the survey to students. Our questions really revolved around what the environment afforded the students in terms of ability to communicate. For example, we were interested in if students felt they were allowed freedom in which discussion topics to participate in and if they can actively learn and participate in the science classroom. We also asked question about how often they can interact with peers and teachers and how much these discussions allowed them to reflect and think about what they knew about science.

      Posted in reply to Jillian Wendt

  • Also, has the survey instrument been utilized in the adolescent environment previously? Has it been validated for use in the adolescent population or gone through any sort of expert review panel or pilot study?

    Posted

  • Our survey was not previously used with an adolescent population but it did go through an expert review with personnel at Penn State. Due to it being used for an undergraduate student's honors thesis it was not used in a pilot study. We had a hard time finding a school who was willing to participate in the survey. To determine if it was appropriate for the population we utilized the grade level reading adjustment on Word. If you are interested in this I encourage you to read the following article. Ping, R. A. (2004). On assuring valid measures for theoretical models using survey data. Journal of Business Research, 57(2), 125-141. It outlines six steps of creating and validating a survey and how a survey that does not meet all six steps is still valuable in the overall development of that field. Thanks! Victoria

    Posted

  • Victoria, Thank you so much for your reply and for the additional reference. It is very much appreciated. Your study is of great interest to me as I, too, have a passion for educational technology specifically in the adolescent science classroom. Thanks for sharing your work and I look forward to hearing more about your continued work.

    Posted

  • Hi Jillian, Thanks! I am very interested in middle school science in the online environment. Do you do any work in this field? Victoria

    Posted

Log in to post a a comment in this discussion.