by Zach Schroeder and Sara Hodges, Department of Psychology
Are you curious about the degree to which you and your students understand each other and read cues at a distance? So are we! We are researchers from the UO’s Psychology Department who study how accurate people are at perceiving other people’s thoughts
and feelings. We have designed a short (20 minute) survey to explore how these perceptions play out in the strange new world of remote instruction that instructors find themselves in now. Because one of our goals is to help instructors during this stressful time, this survey has two parts: First, we’re collecting instructors’ perceptions about remote instruction, which will be an important resource as we continue to adapt going forward. Second, this survey contains an optional supplement that you can forward to your students about their perceptions of your remotely taught class, which we will summarize and return to you after the end of this term – you may find this information useful. In addition, there will be an opportunity at the end of the survey to be contacted about follow-ups, which will gather additional information about how instructors’ perceptions of teaching during COVID-19 continue to change as time goes on. Survey Link: https://oregon.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_4Z8FApy88eFGlRX We are Zach Schroeder, a first year Psychology Ph.D. student and Psychology Prof. Sara Hodges. Zach initially had plans to study teachers’ perceptions of students’ thoughts and feelings in the classroom – that was, until COVID-19 hit, and he, like just about everyone else, had to drastically change his research plans. As we altered the research to comply with the restrictions imposed by COVID-19 – and as we also found ourselves in one Zoom meeting after another! – we began wondering how people may use different strategies to try to guess what others are thinking and feeling during online interactions than they do during in-person interactions. Was the lack of some in-person cues one of the reasons online teaching seemed so difficult? Wouldn’t it be interesting to catch a group of experts – that is, instructors! – as they adapt to the new challenge of trying to figure out what their students are thinking and feeling, all via online platforms? How are instructors solving the problem of figuring out what students do and do not understand, without many of the cues they are used to getting from students who share space with them in a physical classroom? That is where you come in! We hope you’ll complete our 20-minute questionnaire that asks you some questions about how you are teaching online, and how your methods of teaching online are similar to – and different from – the methods you used previously in face-to-face classes. First and foremost, we wish to record the experience of instructors who are bringing considerable skill and effort to the (surprise!) unexpected task of teaching online. We don’t want your creative attempts and clever adaptations to be lost in the chaos of the pandemic. Additionally, we want to document the solutions you are discovering for this most “academic” of COVID-19 challenges, in the hopes that they can both be shared across departments and campuses, as well as offer insights to those of us who study accuracy in interpersonal interactions. How can participating help you? We hope to use the findings from this research to help instructors in three main ways. First, we’re hoping to gather insights from you, the experts, in how you navigate educating and building relationships with students while social distancing. While we all look forward to the day when we can return to “business as usual,” COVID-19 likely will continue to impact the use of online instruction far into the future. After collecting your feedback, we will examine the tools you have come up with in the context of the wider literature on interpersonal accuracy. We hope to highlight practices that are classroom tested and that research suggests should be maximally effective. These findings will be returned to you in a follow-up to this blog post. Second, a portion of this study examines how instructors’ self-perceptions match their students’ perceptions of their teaching. If you complete the survey and pass along the link we include for a supplementary survey for your students, we will analyze your students’ responses and share aggregated results from your class with you, if you want. This is not intended as an evaluative measure of instructional success, but instead as information that may help you know how your students’ perceptions of your teaching online match up with how you think you come across online. Third, this research also offers instructors the opportunity to opt-in to follow-up surveys. By tracking your perceptions of online-instruction over time, including after we return to in-classroom instruction, we hope to document the impact widespread online teaching has had on instructors. Are there teaching insights to be gained from having to approach a familiar task in an unfamiliar way? Are assumptions we made about our students’ learning in regular classrooms challenged by teaching online? This has been a unique time – we’d like to capture the innovations and insights that have come alongside all the stress and inconvenience. We leave you with some reassurance. As challenging as it may seem, a robust series of findings suggest that people are consistently better than chance at guessing what other people are thinking. So don’t worry. At the same time, it’s also true that people are generally not that much better than chance! Reading people is really complex. If it feels incredibly difficult to figure out what your students are thinking when you look at them over Zoom, that’s because you are engaging in a highly sophisticated human trick – and also because – let’s face it! – right now, everything is hard! And if nothing else, if you participate in this survey, you can feel good about the fact that your struggles in the classroom will help us with our struggles to adapt our research during a pandemic!
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