An Empirical Study on Self-Efficacy of Online Learning of Overseas Chinese Children in Europe

Abstract

In the post Covid-19 pandemic era, it is relatively difficult for some Chinese schools in Europe which used to provide offline extra classes for overseas Chinese children after hours of local public school as before. In order to meet the multifaceted learning needs of students, online extra classes teaching, including online Chinese language classes and some online art classes are increasingly offered as a supplement to the diversity of teaching activities in Chinese schools in Europe, which ultimately is intended to enhance the learning abilities of overseas Chinese children as well as to alleviate the pressure of teaching resources of the schools. Children’s learning self-efficacy in online extra courses has its own uniqueness, which can be considered from three dimensions, including learning confidence, learning ability, and self-assessment ability. This study aims to examine the factors influencing the self-efficacy of Chinese overseas children and to make optimization suggestions of better teaching methods. In search of that, an online questionnaire survey with 127 participants from Chinese overseas children aged 5 to 15 was collected. Results show that the role of learning confidence of overseas Chinese children dominates over their learning ability and self-assessment ability. Gender and age have less effect on self-efficacy but have an impact on learning confidence. In order to improve the online self-efficacy of overseas Chinese children, Chinese schools in Europe do not need to show gender difference when doing classroom activities in online teaching, and efforts should also be made to keep the courage of higher-aged students to trial and error. For teachers, they are supposed to explore more of their students’ individual characteristics in future classrooms, rather than adopting a uniform and unchanging teaching model.