The effect of different transactional distance levels on students' perceptions of social, cognitive, and teaching presence, and academic achievement

The aim of the study is to examine the effects of different levels of transactional distance on students' social cognitive and teaching presence perceptions and academic achievement. The research was carried out in a two-factor 3x2 intergroup factorial design. The study group of the research consists of 72 students studying at the departments of pre-school teaching and classroom teaching at the Faculty of Education of a state university. Students in Experiment 1 (n=24), Experiment 2 (n=24) and Experiment 3 (n=24) groups studied online for 16 weeks with different levels of transactional distance. During the education process, students in the experimental groups were provided with structured, moderately structured and unstructured online environments with the dialog dimension of the interactional distance theory fixed (very). The fuzzy analytic hierarchy process was used in the planning of the structure dimension. The data of the research were collected with the scale of the research community, blogs in the online learning environment, activity records in the online learning environment, task files, project file, achievement test and opinion form on the online learning environment. Descriptive statistics, one-factor ANOVA, one-factor ANCOVA, MANOVA and content analysis were used in the analysis of the data. As a result of the statistical analysis, no significant difference was observed in the students' task scores, participation in course activities, blog scores and project scores according to different levels of transactional distance. It was observed that there was a significant difference between the posttest achievement scores corrected according to the pretest achievement scores of the students. It was observed that there was a significant difference between the average achievement score of the students in the unstructured group and the average achievement scores of the students in the structured group, in favor of the unstructured group. There was no significant difference between the average achievement scores of the students in the medium structured group and the students in the unstructured and structured group. Among the academic achievement scores of the groups, the average score of the students in the moderately structured group was higher than the average score of the students in the structured and unstructured group. It was observed that the average academic achievement score of the students in the structured group was slightly higher than the students in the unstructured group. There was no significant difference between the academic achievement scores adjusted according to the pretest success scores of the students in the groups with different transactional distance levels. It was observed that there was no significant difference between the research community scale scores of the groups. It was observed that the mean score of social presence of the structured group was higher than the mean score of both the moderately structured and unstructured groups, but there was no significant difference between the groups. Although the mean score of cognitive presence was higher in the structured group than in the moderately structured and unstructured groups, this difference was not significant. Although the mean of teaching presence score of the structured group was higher than the mean score of the moderately structured and unstructured groups, the mean score of teaching presence did not show a significant difference according to different interaction distance levels. It was observed that the students' satisfaction with the online environment they were in was effective in the absence of any difference between the academic achievement scores of the groups and the research community scale scores. It has been seen that the dialogue environment provided by the online environments and the instructor's interest in the students (keeping communication and interaction high) are effective in this process. As a result, the high dialogue presented at different levels of transactional distance was effective in eliminating the differentiation based on the structure size that may occur between the groups. If the dialog is kept at the maximum level in online environments, the processing distance that may occur due to the size of the structure can be prevented.