Shifting from Face-to-Face Instruction to Distance Learning of Science in China and Israel During COVID-19: Students’ Motivation and Teachers’ Motivational Practices

Science teachers in many countries were required to shift from face-to-face (F2F) instruction to distance learning (DL) during the COVID-19 pandemic. With the aim of helping science teachers learn how to support their students in negotiating such shifts in the future, we used an online motivation survey based on achievement goal theory to investigate the shifts to over two thousand 8th grade students’ perceptions of their science teachers’ motivational practices and their own goal orientations towards science that occurred during the transition from F2F instruction to DL in two very different countries, China and Israel. We hoped to identify issues common to both countries, assuming that these issues might be relevant to other countries as well. Factor analysis, t-tests, and multiple regression were used to identify key teacher motivational practices, changes to these practices and to students’ goal orientations, and relations between teacher practices and student goal orientations. The major predictor of students’ mastery orientation towards science in both F2F instruction and DL, teachers’ attentiveness to their students’ need to understand, declined for students in both countries during the shift from F2F to DL, and was associated with a decline in students’ mastery orientation, engagement, and enjoyment.