Distance Teaching During the COVID-19 Crisis: Social Connectedness Matters Most for Teaching Quality and Students’ Learning

In spring 2020, school closures were enacted to slow the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. Students and teachers faced the challenge of organizing digital teaching and learning without sufficient time to prepare. In this study, we investigated how teachers implemented teaching from a distance and how these different implementations were associated with students’ and parents’ perceptions of teaching quality and students’ social involvement, enjoyment of learning, academic effort, and perceived competence. To this end, we examined data from 277 teachers, 3,159 students in Grades 5 to 10, and 1,688 parents who rated classes in mathematics, German language arts, and English as a foreign language during the school closures. The results showed that teachers’ implementations of distance teaching varied greatly. Teaching methods enabling social connectedness (e.g., video meetings, learning videos created by the teacher) revealed the most consistent positive associations with students’ and parents’ teaching quality ratings and students’ learning experiences.