Distance Teaching During the COVID-19 Crisis - Social Connectedness Matters Most for Teaching Quality and Students’ Learning

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by Adam

School closures in spring 2020 disrupted normal teaching and learning, forcing students and teachers to organize distance instruction with limited preparation time. This study examines how secondary-school teachers implemented distance teaching and how these implementations relate to students’ and parents’ perceptions of teaching quality and students’ social involvement, enjoyment of learning, academic effort, and perceived competence. Data from 277 teachers, 3,159 students (Grades 5–10), and 1,688 parents cover mathematics, German language arts, and English as a foreign language, showing strong positive associations for distance methods that enable social connectedness.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages14

Reading Time35 min

AccessFree to download

Distance teaching during the COVID-19 crisis

Purpose and research aims

Study design and data sources

Teaching quality framework and evaluation domains

Findings and implications

AERA Open January-December 2021, Vol. 7, No. 1, pp. 1–14 DOI: 10. 1177/23328584211052050 Article reuse guidelines: [sagepub.com/journals-permissions](sagepub.com/journals-permissions)[ ](sagepub.com/journals-permissions)© The Author(s) 2021. [https://journals.sagepub.com/home/ero](https://journals.sagepub.com/home/ero) Distance Teaching During the COVID-19 Crisis: Social Connectedness Matters Most for Teaching Quality and Students’ Learning Ann-Kathrin Jaekel University of Tübingen Katharina Scheiter Leibniz-Institut für Wissensmedien University of Tübingen Richard Göllner University of Tübingen In spring 2020, school closures were enacted to slow the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. Students and teachers faced the challenge of organizing digital teaching and learning without sufficient time to prepare. In this study, we investigated how teachers implemented teaching from a distance and how these different implementations were associated with students’and parents’perceptions of teaching quality and students’ social involvement, enjoyment of learning, academic effort, and perceived competence. To this end, we examined data from 277 teachers, 3,159 students in Grades 5 to 10, and 1,688 parents who rated classes in mathematics, German language arts, and English as a foreign language during the school closures. The results showed that teachers’ implementations of distance teaching varied greatly. Teaching methods enabling social connectedness (e.g., video meetings, learning videos created by the teacher) revealed the most consistent positive associations with students’and parents’ teaching quality ratings and students’ learning experiences. Keywords: classroom management, classroom research, correlational analysis, COVID 19-pandemic, distance education, effect size, evaluation, learning environments, regression analyses The only positive thing was the silence while working. Besides that, I missed the social contact very much, and of course being able to ask the teacher spontaneously when I had questions. —Male student, seventh grade ThE worldwide school closures in spring 2020 were a huge challenge for everyone involved in school life. Students and teachers had to get used to a very different teaching and learning format, and parents were more involved than ever before in their children’s learning processes (Garbe et al., 2020) . Due to the suddenness of the closures, schools had only little time to react, and thus, in most cases, there were usually no conceptualizations of what distance learning and teaching should look like during this exceptional phase (Bayrakdar & Guveli, 2020; Vodafone Foundation Germany, 2020) . Consequently, it can be assumed that distance learning was implemented very differently not only across schools but also by different individual teachers, and the consequences for teaching quality and students’ learning were unknown (helm et al., 2021; Voss & Wittwer, 2020) . For teaching and learning in distance education, several theories and guidelines for the effective implementation of distance education exist (Goos & Salomons, 2017; Graham et al., 2001; holmberg, 1995; National Standards for Quality [NSQ], 2019) . Some of these indicators (e.g., monitoring students’ learning progress and regular feedback) have also been confirmed empirically, as they have been found to be positively associated with student outcomes (e.g., hawkins et al., 2013). These factors have been found to exhibit a great deal of overlap with indicators of face-to-face teaching quality in the school context (e.g., Doyle, 2013; hamre & Pianta, 2010; hattie, 2009) . In such work, a framework comprising three basic domains of teaching quality was created, namely, classroom management, supportive climate, and cognitive activation, each operationalized in terms of several quality Creative Commons Non Commercial CC BY-NC: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonComm

FAQs

What problem does the study address during the COVID-19 school closures?

The study addresses how teachers implemented distance teaching during spring 2020 closures and how these implementations affected teaching quality perceptions and students’ learning experiences.

What data and participants were used in the study?

The study used ratings from 277 teachers, 3,159 students in Grades 5–10, and 1,688 parents during the school closures.

Which distance teaching methods showed the most consistent positive associations?

Methods enabling social connectedness, such as video meetings and learning videos created by the teacher, showed the most consistent positive associations with teaching quality ratings and learning experiences.

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by Adam