Is it the same, socially? Fully online learning and its impacts on social identification, academic performance and confidence

ABSTRACT

Previous research demonstrates links between student social identification, perceived learning norms, learning approaches and academic outcomes and indicates the value of bolstering student social identification in higher education settings. The current study aimed to examine whether the models identified in this previous research replicated in a fully online environment. This is critical knowledge in the context of the industry-wide debate on the gains and losses of online university. Self-report survey data (N = 112), e-learning analytics and grades were used to examine student social identification, perceptions, behaviours, and outcomes over a 4-month period of online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. Results were unexpected: previous models failed to replicate in our data. Exploratory analysis identified three ways forward: examination of student learning activity outside of institutionally provided online contexts, revisiting the use of SPQ as a measure of learning approach, and examining student social interactions and identification in a social media-rich online environment.

KEYWORDS:

• Social identity
• isolation
• academic performance
• online learning
• medical students
• COVID-19 pandemic

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data-availability system

Due to the potential risk for re-identification due to the small pool of students (total N = 200) from which we draw our data, data are not publically available, but are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Ethics

Ethical components of the research were approved by the ANU Human Research Ethics Committee (protocol 2020/224).

Notes

1 NB: reliability does not indicate unidimensionality and future research in larger samples would benefit from PCA analysis of this combined measure to determine what, exactly, is being measured.

2 This reliability issue warrants discussion, as this scale has been validated. As the sub-scale is only three items, it is easily destabilised by one rogue item and, in our data, intercorrelations indicated that the item “[institution] medical students typically prefer to cram a lot of information before exams” was the cause of this problem. This item was negatively correlated with the other two items, likely indicating that, regardless of the valence of the norm (toward deep or surface learning), students in this particular context were engaging in “cramming” behaviour. This is not unusual in medical school contexts.