Correlation Between Physical Cues and Comfortability Participating In an Online Environment
Student Presenter(s): Carmine Velez, Deb Preom
Faculty Mentor: Melissa Huey
Department: Psychology
School/College: College of Arts and Sciences, New York City
The recent transition from in-person classrooms to a fully remote learning environment has created concerns about the effectiveness of online learning. With this, one of the major concerns is a lack of engagement from students which in turn, can cause a lower quality of education. A study from June of 2014 provides evidence that a teacher's use of physical cues, such as eye contact, correlates with the performance of students (Atta & Ayaz, 2014). The use of video chat to communicate changes the way students can interact with one another, with reduced opportunity to read others physical cues such as eye contact, hand raising, and posture. These physical cues have been categorized to measure the impact of such nonverbal behavior in communication (Mehrabian, 1968). This study will be used to determine if students feel a lack of physical cues and how this correlates with the student's level of comfortability participating in online classrooms. College students at New York Tech will be asked to take a survey asking about their perception of physical cues in a traditional classroom environment versus an online environment. We hypothesis that students will recognize a lack of physical cues in an online environment, and that this will correlate with a lack of comfort and engagement in the classroom.