Lisette Wijnia

Relationship quality time: the validation of a relationship quality scale in higher education

ABSTRACT This study investigated the overall quality of the interpersonal relationship students have with faculty and staff, that is, relationship quality (RQ). In relationship management research, RQ is paramount for the creation of bonds with customers, which in turn is necessary for the sustainability of organizations, that is, continuity and growth. In higher education, it is not only recent changes in funding of education that urge us to further investigate RQ, as students having relational bonds with their teachers and faculty/staff is important as well. These relationships are expected to positively influence students’ college experiences. Although educational literature addresses the importance of student–faculty relationships, little is known about students’ perceptions of the quality of their relationship with their program. The aim of this study was therefore to get a more in-depth understanding of the concept and measurement of RQ within a higher education context. To that end, an existing RQ scale was used measuring five dimensions: trust in honesty, trust in benevolence, satisfaction, affective commitment, and affective conflict. A confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was conducted on survey responses of 551 students from a Dutch university of applied sciences. Next to the CFA, a small-scale focus group discussion was held to validate the quantitative findings of students’ perceptions on RQ. The findings confirm that the RQ instrument is an adequate instrument to investigate RQ in a higher education context. Additional qualitative findings also suggest that students acknowledge the relevance of RQ and the need for having a good relationship with their faculty and staff.

The association between motivation, affect, and self-regulated learning when solving problems

Self-regulated learning (SRL) skills are essential for learning during school years, particularly in complex problem-solving domains, such as biology and math. Although a lot of studies have focused on the cognitive resources that are needed for learning to solve problems in a self-regulated way, affective and motivational resources have received much less research attention. The current study investigated the relation between affect (i.e., Positive Affect and Negative Affect Scale), motivation (i.e., autonomous and controlled motivation), mental effort, SRL skills, and problem-solving performance when learning to solve biology problems in a self-regulated online learning environment. In the learning phase, secondary education students studied video-modeling examples of how to solve hereditary problems, solved hereditary problems which they chose themselves from a set of problems with different complexity levels (i.e., five levels). In the posttest, students solved hereditary problems, self-assessed their performance, and chose a next problem from the set of problems but did not solve these problems. The results from this study showed that negative affect, inaccurate self-assessments during the posttest, and higher perceptions of mental effort during the posttest were negatively associated with problem-solving performance after learning in a self-regulated way.