Comunicación profesor-alumno a través de las redes sociales. Percepciones de los estudiantes sobre la credibilidad docente en Twitter

Résumé

Students' perceptions of teacher credibility are considered as one of the most important elements in teacher-student relationship and in teaching-learning processes. These perceptions occur not just in interactions within the classroom but also in contexts of computer-mediated communication. In this sense, university instructors are gradually starting to use social networks with students as a medium of communication, so that what teachers publish and share in their online profiles has an impact on students' perceptions of their credibility. Thus, the main goal of this Doctoral Thesis was to determine students´ perceptions of university instructors´ credibility through Twitter. Specifically, two pieces of research were carried out: in the first one, an adaptation and validation into Spanish of the Source Credibility Measure (McCroskey & Teven, 1999) was performed in which their psychometric properties were evaluated, and in the second one, students´ perceptions of instructor credibility on Twitter were analyzed and the matter of which Twitter profile of an university instructor is more credible was established; differences by gender were determined between male and female university instructors and the correlation between teacher credibility and students´ academic motivation was analyzed. The first study involved 352 students from the University of Seville from different degree subjects in the field of Social Sciences. The results of the evaluation of the psychometric properties of the Source Credibility Measure emphasize that both the original model and the alternative model obtained from the exploratory factor analysis are valid and reliable scales for measuring the credibility of university instructors, suitable for use in Spanish. In the second piece of research 333 students from the Faculty of Educational Sciences of the University of Seville participated, from the first, second and third year of the Degree in Primary Education, the Degree in Early Childhood Education and the Degree in Pedagogy. For the collection of data, a sociodemographic data questionnaire, the Spanish version of the Source Credibility Measure (Froment, García, Bohórquez & García-Jiménez, 2019) and the Spanish version of the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (Martinez & Galán, 2000) were applied. The research was conducted using quasi-experimental methodology, for which three Twitter accounts of a male university instructor were created with professional, social and mixed tweets and three Twitter accounts of a female university instructor with professional, social and mixed tweets. The results indicate that the professional profiles were perceived by the students as the most credible, followed by the mixed profiles and the social profiles, in the profiles of both the male and female university instructors as well as in the comparisons made between the two; that there are no differences in students´ perceptions of teacher credibility between the professional profile of the female university instructor and the professional profile of the male university instructor and between the mixed profile of the female university instructor and the mixed profile of the male university instructor although there is a significant difference in the dimension of teacher trustworthiness in the social profiles, and it was established that the female university instructor of the social profile was perceived by students as more trustworthy than the male university instructor of the social profile and that positive relationships were found in the credibility of teachers as perceived by the students who observed the professional profile of the female university instructor and the male university professor and the mixed profile of the female university instructor and the male university instructor with their academic motivation. Finally, the obtained findings are discussed, future research lines are proposed and the main contributions of this Doctoral Thesis are mentioned.