4th Teaching & Education Conference, Venice

COMMUNITY OF INQUIRY FRAMEWORK: INTERRELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN DISCIPLINE AND PERSONALITY IN BLENDED CLASSROOMS

CHANG-TIK CHAN

Abstract:

The purpose of the present study is to investigate the interrelationships between discipline and personality in a blended classroom using the Community of Inquiry (CoI) model. To this end, the mean and standard deviation values of the Teaching Presence, Social Presence and Cognitive Presence are computed after controlling for discipline. It is followed by a factorial ANOVA to determine the main effects of the high and low of each personality trait as well as the four different clusters of discipline on the presences. In this article, academic disciplines are conceptualised according to Biglan (1973) and Becher (1994) into “hard” and “soft” paradigm as well as "pure" and "applied". Moreover, the Big Five is utilised which has five dimensions of human personality, that is, openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. The study used a non-experimental or qualitative design in particular survey method utilising questionnaires and focus group interviews on gathering data to answer a research question. A total of 12 lecturers and 408 students from three institutions were involved, of these numbers 111 data were discarded as they were incomplete. Five lecturers who failed to follow through their teaching plans were also excluded. Lecturers and students from both "pure" and "applied" disciplines as well as "hard" and "soft" participated in this study on a voluntary basis. At least two months before the research commenced, the chief researcher conducted a one-day workshop for all the participating lecturers. Lecturers learned how to organise a 12-week syllabus into major themes. With each major theme, lecturers selected subject matters (topics), resources, learning activities and assessments needed. After that, these broad themes were organised into a teaching plan with online and offline activities. The teaching plans were submitted to the chief researcher for checking before it was implemented. The results indicate that there is a significant difference (p < 0.001) in the Teaching Presence between the hard-applied and hard-pure as well as the hard-applied and soft-pure disciplines only for the conscientiousness personality. Correspondingly, there is a significant difference in the Social Presence between the hard-applied and soft-pure disciplines across all the five personality traits. However, there is no significant difference in the Cognitive Presence for all the discipline clusters across all personality traits. For further research, the CoI instructional approach to include both public and private institutions in Malaysia and Southeast Asia can reveal the changing instructional roles and effects of the three presences.

Keywords: Community of Inquiry, student’s personality, discipline, blended learning, student-centred teaching

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