Student-Centered Learning Characteristic and Perception During Emergency Remote Teaching in a Minority-Serving Institution
Abstract
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many universities moved to emergency remote teaching (ERT). This allowed institutions to continue their instruction despite not being in person, yet inevitably created subsequent impact impeding the student learning. Instructors in UC Merced as a research-intensive and minority-serving institution (MSI) have adopted various pedagogical changes compared with in-person instructions to adapt the ERT. We conducted interviews after ERT to collect such data and anticipated an interesting trend of them becoming more student-centered throughout the period. We aim to analyze the data to study and prove the existence and extent of such perception about the more emerging student-centered learning (SCL) characteristic. We conducted qualitative inductive coding on the interview transcripts then adopted a theoretical framework to build the codes into the constructs. From the constructs, we are able to formulate and quantify the extent of the SCL characteristic of instructors' teaching and discourse practices, the extent of them describing their teaching practices as SCL, and the extent of them enact SCL and its alignment with their enacted practices. The construction and analysis shed light on the SCL pedagogy developments in STEM discipline.
Hanbo Hong, Graduate Student, UC Merced