CLASSROOM CLIMATE AND STUDENT SELF-EFFICACY IN E-LEARNING

Abstract

The last two decades have seen significant growth in e-Learning in many institutions, with the main growth engine being significant development of technologies providing access to information. These technologies have dramatically changed how societies and individuals communicate. The current study examined whether the paradigm of good teaching dimensions customary in the research literature can predict students’ self-efficacy and social-academic climate in e-Learning. For this purpose, 147 students from different academic institutions were sampled and asked to choose one course they had studied online, completing a questionnaire on their experience of the course. The questionnaire was divided into four sub-topics, where at first the participants were asked to answer several demographic questions and the rest of the questions were divided by the research variables as follows: the first group of questions dealt with perceived self-efficacy; the second group dealt with the teaching dimensions presented in Hativa’s (2015) theory, from which select teaching behaviors were extracted. In the final part, the questionnaire examined the social-academic climate during the course. The research results show correlations between the research variables and some of the demographic variables. The higher the respondent’s age and years of schooling, the higher the lecturer’s evaluation. Furthermore, men were found to rank lecturers on teaching dimensions significantly lower than did women. Respondent self-efficacy rose with age and years of schooling. Moreover, the higher the participants’ age, the more positive the climate reported, and women tended to rank classroom climate higher than did men. Keywords: classroom climate, e-Learning, self-efficacy, teaching dimensions