Improving the Classroom Community Scale (CCS): Toward a Short Form of the CCS

• In Event: 81.032 - MTCC Roundtable Session 37
  In Roundtable Session: 81.032-7 - Community, Peer Feedback, and Adaptive Learning

Abstract

Classroom community, or students' sense of connectedness and cooperative learning, can strongly influence success, whereas its absence can lead to increased dropout rates, especially in online courses. As more learning becomes technologically embedded and Massive Open Online Courses increase in popularity, measuring and examining classroom community accurately and reliably is critical to understanding its role in online learning. We examined Rovai's twenty-item Classroom Community Scale as a measure of community and conducted a series of investigations on reliability and construct validity to propose the Classroom Community Scale Short Form (CCS-SF), a smaller eight-item subset which maintains reliability while increasing construct validity by reducing factor loading issues. The CCS-SF should allow us to measure community more quickly and reliably.

Authors

• Jeff (Jaehyung) Cho, University of Alberta

• Carrie Demmans Epp, University of Alberta