The Effect of Teachers' Cognitive Flexibility on Attitudes towards Compulsory Distance Education during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

The period when education services were tried to be provided remotely due to the COVID-19 epidemic enabled teachers to be intertwined with technology-supported teaching platforms. The acquisition of the technology required for the use of the platform, the adaptation of the existing teaching strategies, methods, and techniques to the platform, and the need to stay in touch with all stakeholders related to education in this process have led to new experiences for teachers as well as many challenging situations. During this process, it was predicted that teachers frequently use their cognitive flexibility, which enables them to think about different solutions and make functional changes for different or problematic situations. The research is a survey study and data were collected from a group of teachers with the Cognitive Flexibility Inventory and the Attitude Scale towards Compulsory Distance Education, whose validity and reliability were retested within the scope of this research. The results of this study, in which the data were analyzed with descriptive statistics, show that the cognitive flexibility of the teachers participating in the research was high during the epidemic period and that they had attitudes that could not be evaluated either positively or negatively regarding compulsory distance education. Although there is a relationship between teachers' cognitive flexibility levels and their attitudes towards compulsory distance education, it is at a low level. The cognitive flexibility of teachers can predict a very small part of their attitudes towards compulsory distance education. The findings obtained from the research are discussed in relation to other research results.

Cognitive flexibility and grit during times of crisis for Turkish EFL teachers

“…In particular, cognitive flexibility as a cognitive trait of teachers during the pandemic has attracted attention as it enables teachers to process multiple alternatives and adjust to a changing environment. Özen and Üçüncü (2022) stated that cognitively flexible teachers were more effective in terms of changing their teaching practices in accordance with the need for ERT by handling the difficulties and uncertainties of the pandemic conditions efficiently. Some studies have explored the associations of flexibility with negative emotions such as depression and anxiety during the pandemic (Crasta et al, 2020; Daks et al, 2020).…”

“…In this period, a wide range of studies investigated various aspects of teachers in terms of their psychology, teaching effectiveness, practices and the challenges which they faced (Donitsa‐Schmidt & Ramot, 2020; König et al, 2020; Talidong & Toquero, 2020). Some studies which investigated teachers' cognitive or noncognitive aspects in the pandemic focused on cognitive flexibility and grit as separate constructs taking their gender, age, years of teaching, and academic subject into account (Gregersen et al, 2021; Özen & Üçüncü, 2022; Shirvan et al, 2021). Although cognitive flexibility and grit were found to sustain teacher effectiveness, these two constructs were not investigated in terms of their relationship with each other taking English language teachers into account from an EFL perspective.…”