Effects of teacher role on student engagement in WeChat-Based online discussion learning

The online discussion format has proven itself to be useful for promoting student collaboration and for accomplishing better learning outcomes. As a popular instant message software in China, WeChat has been commonly adopted for supporting academic group discussions. Many studies have explored how teacher facilitation affects students' learning performance in the synchronous or asynchronous discussion settings. However, the conclusions are not consistent and there is relative less research about the effects of teacher role on student engagement in the context of online discussion using the semi-synchronous tool-WeChat. This study began by identifying three dimensions of student engagement: behavioral engagement, cognitive engagement, and emotional engagement. A quasi-experiment was then conducted to compare student engagement among experiment groups (with teacher facilitation) and control groups (without teacher facilitation). A total of 46 college students were divided into eight groups and asked to discuss two specific topic tasks. To evaluate participants' behavioral and cognitive engagement, this study used a more objective data analysis method by applying content analysis rather than only based on surveys. Participants were required to complete a questionnaire to report their emotional engagement. The results show the behavioral and cognitive engagement of the experimental group with teacher facilitation were significantly higher than that of the control group without teacher facilitation. However, there was no significant effect of teacher facilitation on participants’ emotional engagement in the experimental group. It is also found that the emerging student leaders show similar positive effects of teacher facilitation towards improving behavioral and cognitive engagement. Future studies about the moderating effects of teaching experience and student leaders are also needed.