Dear Instructors,
With the spread of COVID-19, universities and colleges across the United States have announced a move from face-to-face to online teaching. This situation creates a hybrid environment where students spend half the semester in face-to-face classrooms and half the semester in online classrooms amid a stressful, emergency situation. It is essential to future emergency educational situations to understand how the current shifting learning environments during this time of emergency (i.e. COVID-19 pandemic) impacts student’s self-efficacy, attitude, sense of belonging and anxiety.
We are looking for educators who would be willing and interested in running a 15 - 20 min survey with their undergraduate science students, once before going online and again at the end of teaching online (end of semester or before moving back to face-to-face instruction, whichever comes first).
We are not trying to uncouple the student’s anxiety around the COVID-19 pandemic with their transition to a new learning environment, but instead build on previous research in online and hybrid learning, as well as the field of education in emergencies (EiE), a mixed method study that will give us insight on students' socio-behavioral states before and after the transition to online learning in reaction to COVID-19. In addition to validated Likert-style surveys, students will be asked three open-ended questions about the impact of COVID-19 on their own lives and education. We will be asking very minimal identifiable information from the students, and the study has already received IRB exempt status. For questions or concerns about IRB approval you can email me, kcallis-duehl@danforthcenter.org, or the head of our IRB, Mindy Darnell, MDarnell@danforthcenter.org.
If you are willing to run this survey with your students, please distribute the survey link below in the template email to your students BEFORE they start the online portion of your class. We are including below a template letter that you can use or modify to communicate the study to your students.
Additionally, please email me kcallis-duehl@danforthcenter.org directly (do not reply to the listserv) the following information:
- The name of your university/college,
- The class(es) you are teaching (e.g. introductory biology),
- The major status of students (science majors or non-majors),
- The number of students enrolled in the class,
- The active-learning level/student interactive level of the class (e.g. do students use clickers, work in groups, etc.),
- And, if you have ever taught in an online setting before and/or have received formal training in teaching in online environments.
For participating in this research, you will be added to an early results email list where we will share preliminary results as they are available, so that you can know how COVID-19 is impacting your students. We will also use this email list to send out a link to the post-survey on April 1st (not due April 1st, but will be available on this date for distribution at the end of your course).
While we regret the health situation that has forced many of us to move to online teaching, we also feel it is important to better understand how this change is impacting our students so that we can make more informed choices in the future. We appreciate your willingness to consider participating in this study and wish everyone the best as we cope with uncharted territory.
Template email for students:
Dear students,
With the spread of COVID-19, universities and colleges across the United States have announced a move from face-to-face to online teaching, including in our own class. To better understand how the move to online classes during this pandemic is impacting you as a student, researchers at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center are conducting a survey to understand how the current shifting learning environments during this time of emergency (i.e. COVID-19 pandemic) impacts student’s self-efficacy, attitude, sense of belonging and anxiety. They would really appreciate you taking 15-20 min to complete the survey. I will follow up at the end of the semester with another survey in order for the researchers to compare how your thoughts and feelings have changed over the course of the last few weeks of the semester.
This survey is optional, but will contribute greatly to improve our understanding of how this change is impacting you and other undergraduate students, so that we can make more informed choices in the future.
Please use the following link to take the survey:
https://survey.iad1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_73eh1u45lTWa9aB
Thank you again for your participation.
Kind Regards,
Kris Callis-Duehl