Development and validation of teacher emotional support scale for the virtual classroom

The immediate shift from face-to-face classes to virtual learning because of the COVID 19 pandemic brought about challenges not only in delivering classroom instruction but also in establishing emotionally supportive environment which greatly affects students’ well-being and achievement. Most resources that have been provided for teachers are focused on using techniques to successfully deliver online lessons and manage assessments. Hence, this paper aimed to develop and validate a scale to serve as guide for teachers in creating an emotionally supportive virtual classroom. This cross-sectional study was intended to identify the components of teacher emotional support as perceived by the students. The results of the confirmatory factor analysis demonstrated the existence of three dimensions of teacher emotional support in the developed scale namely, positive climate, teacher’s sensitivity, and regard to student’s perspective. Reliability results further support the consistency of the scale to determine the extent of teacher’s emotional support in the virtual classroom. Thus, the developed scale was considered a valid tool in measuring the emotional support received by the students from their teacher. Further studies are suggest to involve a more distributed sample and include the interaction of teacher emotional support to other factors of students’ well-being to test the convergent and discriminant validity of the scale.