The Relationship between Online Classroom Incivility and Sense of Community of Online Undergraduate Students
Incivility is not just bullying and physically threatening students. Uncivil behaviors include more mild forms of classroom disruption, including plagiarizing, posting terse responses, and continually asking for extensions for assignments. A student's motivation for learning can be hampered, when subjected to incivility causing classroom disruptions. The purpose of this study is to explore the relationship between student incivility in the online learning environment, as scored by the Incivility in Online Learning Environments instrument, and the student's sense of community, as measured by the Community Classroom scale. This quantitative study seeks to extend Tuckman's model (1965) of the Theory of Group Development as it relates to incivility in asynchronous learning. A non experimental correlational design is employed to examine the online student's sense of learning and connectedness for online undergraduate students at a large private Christian university. The participants were undergraduate students taking an online course and the number of participants were 129. A Pearson's Product moment correlation was used to interpret the research results. Findings are examined and recommendations for future research will be made.