Reavis 1

Serena Reavis
Dr. Kimberly Weems
ST 508-601
24 April 2015
Literature Review: Teacher Verbal Immediacy and Sense of Classroom Community
As online education continues to grow, more emphasis has been placed on developing
effective pedagogical strategies for teaching in the online course environment. Though some
online courses share traits of their face-to-face counterparts, many also need adaptations for
effective online learning. Ni and Aust (2008) examine two of these strategies in their research
article, Examining teacher verbal immediacy and sense of classroom community in online
classes. Through quantitative analysis, they find that teacher verbal immediacy was a
significant predictor of online learners posting frequency and that sense of classroom
community was a significant predictor of learner satisfaction and perceived learning.
In Examining teacher verbal immediacy and sense of classroom community in online
classes, Ni and Aust (2008) focus on using quantitative methods to analyze the effect of teacher
verbal immediacy and sense of classroom community on students level of course satisfaction, on
students perceived loss of learning, and students online posting frequency within online
discussions (p. 477). In this case, they examine two exploratory variables that are considered
best practices in online pedagogy--teacher verbal immediacy and sense of classroom
community--to see if they have a correlation with and relation to the positive course outcomes-student course satisfaction, perceived learning, and online posting frequency--which are the
response variables. In fact, they seek to answer the following research questions:

1.

How is teacher verbal immediacy related to course satisfaction, perceived

learning, and posting frequency in online classes?

2.
How is sense of classroom community related to course satisfaction, perceived
learning, and posting frequency in online classes?
3.
How do gender and course type influence perception of verbal immediacy and
sense of classroom community in online courses? (p.482)
The explanatory variables in this study represent effective online pedagogical strategies.
In online classes, teacher verbal immediacy represents the direct communication of the instructor
during the course of the online class (p. 481). For instance, the instructor may use
announcements to introduce a new course unit or reply to a student on the discussion board
clarifying a main point. In each of these cases, the instructor is establishing his or her presence
in the online environment and making connections with the students. Sense of classroom
community, on the other hand, represents the connection students feel with one another (p. 481).
Students might experience this through effective online discussions where they construct
knowledge together or through a group project. Both of these traits are usually correlated with
student success in an online class. For the purposes of the research, the researchers used these
measures as the explanatory variables. Rather than constructing a measurement of the variables,
they asked students to rate their perception of the variables, which introduces potential
subjectivity in the design.
To collect data for these measures, the researchers conducted an online survey. Because
the researchers were using students perceptions of the variables, they were able to ask students
to rate the factors through a likert-scale based survey. To gather respondents, they asked a group
of online instructors to recruit volunteers from their online sections to complete the survey,
which resulted in a convenience sample of 214 students. The students represented both
undergraduate and graduate classes, and 69% were female while 29% were male (2% did not

reveal gender on the survey). The respondents ranged in ages 18-61 years with a mean of 38.1
years, which may suggest that the respondents are not representative of the classes as a whole (p.
482). Generally, even in graduate programs, the mean age of students is lower.
Once they gathered and cleaned the data, the researchers used three quantitative measures
to examine the relationships between the variables. First, they ran bivariate correlation to
determine the correlation between the two explanatory variables, among the response variables,
and between both individual explanatory variables and response variables. Second, they
analyzed the effect of the two explanatory variables on each response variable through multiple
linear regression. Last, they ran the ANOVA to answer their third research question, which
incorporated the qualitative variables of gender and course type into the model (p. 4840). In this
case, they were hoping to see if there were differences in perceptions based on gender or course
type.
During the bivariate correlation analysis, the researchers found that all variables were
correlated. The largest correlations were between teacher verbal immediacy and sense of
classroom community (r = 0.60, p < .001) and between sense of classroom community and
online satisfaction (r = 0.71, p < .001), with both showed a strong positive correlation,
considering the researchers correlation scale (large > .50, moderate > .30, slight > .10). They
found a moderate positive correlation between teacher verbal immediacy and online satisfaction
(r = 0.48, p < .001) and a slight positive correlation between posting frequency and verbal
immediacy (r = 0.23, p = .002). The correlations with perceived learning loss were negative
because students felt that any knowledge lost decreased as the explanatory variables increased
with a moderate correlation between satisfaction and perceived learning loss (r = -0.41, p < .
001), slight correlation between teacher verbal immediacy and perceived learning loss (r =- 0.22,

p = .002), and slight correlation between sense of community and perceived learning loss (r =
-0.21, p < .001) (p. 484-485). Overall, Ni and Aust found some correlation amongst all of the
variables.
The multiple linear regression analysis further narrowed some of the relationships
between the variables. The researchers first analyzed the combination of verbal immediacy and
sense of classroom community on students level of course satisfaction and found that the
explanatory variables were significantly related to the response variable (t = 12.581, p < .001);
however, under more analysis, it became clear that there was not a significant linear relationship
between verbal immediacy and students level of course satisfaction (t = 1.397, p = .164), so they
examined multiple factors to see if multicollinearity was at play. After ruling multicollinearity
out, they concluded that only sense of community was related to students level of satisfaction (t
= 14.770, p < .001). This pattern--of finding significance in the multiple linear regression,
recognizing that one explanatory variable was not significant, and considering factors of
multicollinearity--held for each of the explanatory variables. In fact, Ni and Aust found that
sense of community was the only significant predictor of students perceived learning loss (t =
-4.005, p < .001) and that teacher verbal immediacy was the only significant predictor of
students posting frequency (t =3.190, p = .002) (p. 485-489).
After the multiple linear regression analysis, the researchers used ANOVA, or analysis of
variance, to analyze whether there was a relationship between gender or course type that could
explain the difference between the variables. For gender, they found that teacher verbal
immediacy was not significantly related to students gender (F = 29.3, p = .33) and that sense of
community was not significantly related to students gender (F = 2.1, p = .15). However, they
did find that course type was significantly related to teacher verbal immediacy and sense of

community. For this analysis, they separated the sample into two groups by course type based on
Kearney, Plaz, and Wendt-Wascos classification of course type (p. 489). They ended up with 37
students in person-oriented courses and 162 students in task-oriented courses, which resulted in a
F test statistic of 29.3 and a p-value of less than .001 similar to other findings, but the difference
in sample sizes makes the assumption of homogeneity for the population questionable (p. 489490).
Overall, Ni and Aust found three main results: 1) correlations among teacher immediacy,

sense of classroom community, satisfaction, and perceived learning were positive, 2) sense of
classroom community was the only significant predictor on learner satisfaction and perceived
learning, 3) teacher verbal immediacy was the only significant predictor of learners posting
frequency. The researchers think that the large number of adult learners may have impacted the
results as adult learning theory points to collaboration as a main motivator of adult students (p.
492), so it follows that sense of community might be more related to the student satisfaction and
perceived learning (p. 490). The sample may also limit the study, as it relied on volunteers from
courses and the sample of task-oriented classes was much higher than the people-oriented
courses. More analysis needs to be done to analyze how different learners and learning
environments demonstrate these traits (p. 495-496).

Reference
Ni, S. & Aust, R. (2008). Examining teacher verbal immediacy and sense of classroom
community in online classes. International Journal of E-learning 7(3), 477-498.