EFFECT OF ONLINE CLASSES ON BASIC PSYCHOLOGICAL NEEDS OF SECONDARY SCHOOL STUDENTS

Abstract

The year 2020 was marked by the Covid-19 that quick became a health crisis globally. This resulted into worldwide lockdown and closure of institutions, including schools, college and universities. In this situation of crisis schools had no choice but to adopt the online teaching-learning practice. Usually, in a classroom situation, it is easy to identify the students’ basic psychological needs as a teacher can see them all face to face and assess the situation through their facial expression and gestures but during online classes this task becomes a bit difficult. Thus in the present paper, the researcher has tried to identify whether the basic psychological needs were met during the adoption of online teaching or not and if met then to what extent students feel satisfied with their online classes. In the present paper, the theoretical framework given by Ormrod (2016) was used to assess the basic psychological needs (Arousal, Autonomy, Competence and Relatedness) of secondary students during the changed scenario of teaching-learning i.e. online classes. A descriptive survey method was used for the study. A Self-made basic psychological need scale was used as a tool to collect the data. A total of 305 students studying in class 9th and 10th standards were selected through the virtual snowball (Baltar & Brunet, 2012) sampling method. Mean, SD, Percentage and Intensity Index methods were used for the data analysis. The result revealed that most of the students fall a little above average which means that they were quite satisfied with the online classes and the basic psychological needs of all the four domains viz. arousal, autonomy, competence and relatedness, of the secondary students were met during an online classes. Keywords: Basic Psychological needs, Secondary students, online classes, Arousal, Autonomy, Competence, and Relatedness.