The Relationship Between Students’ Perceived Sense of Community and Satisfaction, Achievement, and Retention in an Online Course

By Michelle A. Drouin. Quarterly review of distance education, 2008

122 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This study evaluated students’ sense of community, satisfaction, achievement, and retention in 3 sections of the same online undergraduate psychology course. Use of asynchronous discussion threads and students’ perceived interaction with fellow students and the instructor were all correlated with students’ perceived sense of community (SOC). When student-student and student-instructor interactions were examined more specifically, the sum of student-student interaction variables was related to SOC, while the sum of student-instructor interaction variables was not. Additionally, although sense of community was related to student satisfaction within the course, it was not related to either course grade or retention in an online course of study. A review of student comments exemplified this and showed that while some students enjoyed, needed, or desired social interaction, some students did not desire sense of community in an online course environment.

Subfields: Education, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4f488ff8f42a6dcaf49056a4da54e728f6aafd7c

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Education

1. Fethi A. Inan
2. Doris U. Bolliger
3. Youngjun Lee
4. Jaeho Choi
5. J. Goopio
6. Catherine Cheung

In Social Psychology

1. Fethi A. Inan
2. Doris U. Bolliger
3. Youngjun Lee
4. Jaeho Choi

Citations in the corpus

• A review of online course dropout research: implications for practice and future research (2011, background): “…involvement and progress (Castles 2004), increasing the amount of faculty feedback (Bocchi et al. 2004), increasing student–student interactions (Drouin 2008; Ivankova and Stick 2007; Pigliapoco and Bogliolo 2008), encouraging the development of an online community (Ivankova and Stick 2007;…”
• Development and Validation of the Online Student Connectedness Survey (OSCS) (2012, background): “While many students’ feeling of community contributes to student satisfaction, not all students expect, need, or value a sense of community in online courses according to Drouin (2008).”