Can Teachers Really Get To Know Our Children Virtually?

Source: August de-Richelieu/Pexels

As school resumes across our country this month, many will opt for or otherwise find their way into virtual options. The wariness surrounding this situation has many sources, but one is certainly the concern that the quality of communication between teachers and students will be lower. And the concern about this goes beyond the transfer of course-related information—the social bond between teachers and students is viewed by many as critical to learning and child development in general.

One thing that underpins social bonds is mutual understanding, and this is the sort of thing that we focus on in this little corner of the internet! As the father of a rising 1st grader, I have many questions about how the next year unfolds, but the personality psychologist in me will narrow it down to one: what can I expect my child’s virtual teacher to know about her?

We know that people become more accurate in judging the personality of those with whom they spend more time, which is referred to as the “acquaintanceship effect” (Funder & Colvin, 1988) in our field of study. At the beginning of a relationship of any kind, we know fairly little about the other person, and through experience, we come to know more. Obviously. Exactly how and when these things occur is less obvious to psychologists, despite decades of research on the topic (see Beer, 2019). It depends on several factors.

One key factor is what you’re trying to know about the other person. In terms of the Big Five traits of personality, if you’re interested in someone’s extraversion or introversion, you may need as little as a 50ms exposure to a facial photograph to get a modest level of accuracy in your judgment (Borkenau, Brecke, Möttig, & Paelecke, 2009). Other traits, such as Agreeableness (how warm and cooperative you are) or Neuroticism (how anxious and prone to negative emotions you are) may take weeks, months, or even years to get a handle on, depending upon the nature of the relationship.

Teachers of young children tend to see those students every day, for large portions of the day, in myriad contexts—as part of teams, when they’re happy, when they’re upset, when they’re working, when they’re playing, etc. Thus, it’s reasonable to expect that at the end of Kindergarten last year, my daughter’s teacher understood her individual tendencies pretty well. This is part of what gives us comfort about sending our children to school—someone else understands them and knows how to work with their unique characteristics to enhance their daily experience and optimize their development.

So, can we still have that experience in a virtual learning environment? Research on personality perceptions from online sources (e.g., personal websites, social media, etc.) suggests that people can learn about others through virtual exposure (e.g., Back et al., 2010), but in many of these cases, the populations studied are adults who are engaged in online activity that (sometimes quite purposefully) involves self-presentation. Can these results apply to children? Can they apply to people who are not explicitly using the context to make themselves known to others?

To partially answer the latter question, we can look to studies of virtual contact with strangers. As mentioned above, previous studies provide evidence that we can generate accurate perceptions of some traits without interacting directly with our subject (Breil, Osterholz, Nestler, & Back, 2019; Wall & Campbell, 2019). One method that has become popular among scientists over time involves asking people to make judgments of others via “thin slices” of behavior. In early work, this meant, say, recording an instructor lecturing and chopping it up into several 10-second samples. From these samples, researchers investigated the extent to which people could make accurate social judgments. In the landmark study referenced just now, Ambady and Rosenthal (1993) found that people could predict teacher effectiveness ratings from these thin slices with surprising accuracy.

But we are not talking about people understanding teacher effectiveness—our concern here is a teacher in a virtual setting understanding a child’s personality. Fortunately, thin slice methodology has been applied to personality judgments in many studies (for an early review, see Ambady, Hallahan, & Rosenthal, 1995), and--even more fortunately--at least one of these studies involved children.

Jennifer Tackett and her team (Tackett, Herzhoff, Kushner, & Rule, 2016) asked children to engage in a series of 15 different brief tasks (e.g., recall a memory, sing a song, solve a math problem) which were recorded and sliced into bite-sized perceptual chunks that were viewed by groups of people who had never met the children. These observers then generated impressions of the children’s personalities based on these clips.

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There are a couple of ways to think about these data. One key question would be whether the different clips of the same child created similar impressions of that child’s personality among different observers—in other words, could others agree what this child is like despite viewing them in different contexts? The answer there seemed to be, generally, yes. These consensus estimates were—in my estimation—pretty strong. So, little bits of children’s behavior convey similar meaning to people just seeing these children for the first time, which implies that it’s possible the child’s personality is showing up in all of these instances.

But the observers could all agree and all be wrong (as happens when we use inaccurate stereotypes), right? That’s why it was important to connect the thin slice judgments to those made by people who were better acquainted with the child. In this case, the researchers chose the parents’ judgments of their child as a sensible comparison standard, and they found that judgments made by people who viewed the thin slices correlated positively with parent ratings (slightly moreso with mothers than with fathers).

Source: Julia M Cameron/Pexels

These results provide a glimmer of hope that someone who sees brief, digitally-mediated snippets of a child’s behavior may come to know something about the child's general patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting. It is important to note that the segments in the original study were generally devoid of natural social context—meaning children were not interacting with anyone other than the camera operator in any real sense (one task involved pretending to introduce oneself to a new person). Thus, it’s possible that teachers who are able to observe their students interacting with one another may gain even more insight than the observers in Tackett, et al. were able to achieve. On the other hand, the statistical support for accuracy in this work (and most other work in low-acquaintance personality judgment) relied upon aggregating judgments across raters.

Children, in most cases, will have only one teacher, so the benefit of multiple perspectives (Beer, 2013) may put a damper on teacher accuracy. In my opinion, the former advantage probably outweighs the latter disadvantage, such that the increased number of thin slice observations available to teachers will more than make up for the fact that there’s only one teacher to make the judgments.

So, will your child’s teacher get to know your child in the way we’ve come to expect from the prolonged, face-to-face interaction that typically characterizes their school experience? Probably not. But will they be able to learn enough about your child to distinguish them from others and facilitate meaningful connections? I think it’s safe to say yes, based on the available data. An unanswered question is whether this knowledge has any impact on your child’s educational attainment, and I am not aware of any data that speak directly to this (i.e., does knowledge of student personality relate to student academic achievement?).

Interestingly, there is scant evidence that more accurately understanding those close to us results in greater relationship satisfaction, which is a more intuitive connection. Even so, as a parent of school and pre-school aged children, I can say that the simple act of my child being known and distinguished from other children is important in itself. It was nice that my eldest’s kindergarten teacher could see my child like I do; it gave me a sense of security that may seem unearned but exists nonetheless. I am hopeful that her teacher, although remote, will be able to do something similar, helping to make this coming experience a little less alien, a little more human.