Sara B. Fuller's Doctoral Dissertation

An Examination of Community College Students' Intrinsic Motivation, Sense of Belonging, and Perception of Presence in Online First-Year Composition Courses 

Online courses have grown in popularity, and higher education continues to diversify. Black students continue to have lower graduation rates and lower success rates in classes, that is more pronounced in online courses, than their White peers. Existing research exploring the challenges and barriers Black students face in online courses has often focused on graduate students, small samples, minoritized or underrepresented students as a whole, or has provided qualitative findings without quantitative data to support them. In this research, intrinsic motivation, sense of belonging, and a desire for more interaction between peers and instructors were three of the barriers that were identified. Therefore, this quantitative study examined intrinsic motivation, sense of belonging, and teacher and social presence among Black and White students in online First Year Composition courses at a large, diverse, Midwestern community college. 

This study established the psychometric properties of the Intrinsic Motivation to Learn Scale, the Brief Course Belonging Scale, and the Social Presence and Teaching Presence components of the Community of Inquiry in Writing Studies Survey using Rasch Principal Components Analysis and the Rasch Rating Scale Model. Pearson correlations were then used to examine the relationships among the three constructs and a MANOVA was used to test for differences between Black and White students. All three instruments were shown to be valid for the community college and online contexts with some proposed revisions. Significant positive correlations were found, as expected, between all constructs. The MANOVA did not have a statistically significant result.