Browsing by Author "Palkamo, Toni"

Goals: The aim of the study was to examine, how Finnish middle school students experienced social support from their teachers during the COVID-19 pandemic in the fall of 2020. In addition, the study sought to find out connections between specific types of social support provided by the teacher and middle school students assessment of their self-regulated learning skills during the emergency remote teaching period. Potentially, the results of the research provide teachers with ways to support their students in their studies, even in the middle of a crisis in distance learning context. Based on earlier studies, social support from the teacher, as well as self-regulated learning skills, are connected to learning outcomes and school attachment in distance education. Methods: The research was carried out using a quantitative research tradition. The methods used in this study included analysis of the statistics, linear correlation analyses, multivariate analysis of variances (MANOVA) and linear regression analysis. The data used in this study is a part of a larger longitudinal study conducted in autumn 2020 as part of the Schooling, teaching and wellbeing in the school community during the COVID-19 pandemic (CEA, University of Helsinki; REAL, Tampere University; NEDIS, Tampere University; Ministry of Education and Culture) project. The final sample included 36,542 students from grades 7–9 from different schools around Finland who had participated in the anonymous online survey implemented by the project team. Results and conclusions: According to the results and the analysis methods used, Finnish secondary school students experienced very little social support from their teachers during the emergency remote teaching period in the autumn 2020. Boys received slightly more social support from their own teachers than girls, and non-binary students even less than boys or girls. There was a positive correlation between all four types of social support from the teacher and the self-regulated skills assessment given by the middle school student. Regarding the types of support mentioned above, there are no clear differences between the types in terms of the strength of the effect. Nonetheless in the future teachers should be able to support their students learning during difficult periods of time by providing them social support, even in remote teaching context.