Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2025
DOI
10.1057/s41599-025-05891-9
Publication Title
Humanities & Social Sciences Communications
Volume
12
Issue
1
Pages
1579 (1-12)
Abstract
The unprecedented evolution of educational technologies has transformed the learning landscape, creating distinct experiences in offline and online learning environments (OLE). However, little attention has been given to exploring students’ identities in the online learning context and how they can influence academic trajectories, limiting the development of a holistic understanding of the nature, effects, and areas of improvement in students’ identity formation in OLE. This study aims to investigate how students’ identity subcomponents differ among offline and OLE students via propensity score matching (PSM) in China, which allows us to find a doppelganger to estimate the counterfactual situation for making causal inferences in tandem with averting selection bias. Then, the study further examines how students’ identities affect motivation for learning achievement through OLS regression. PSM results indicate that goal-directedness, interpersonal relation, and self-acceptance were lower in students’ identity construction in OLE. Besides, all students achievement motivation shows that agency positively affects all students. Regarding the online learning environment, students’ agency and proactivity show negative effects on motivation. In contrast, goal-directedness indicates positive effects compared to the offline course students. Reflecting on these findings, this study offers instructional and online technology development implications.
Rights
© 2025 The Authors.
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this license to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder
Data Availability
Article states: "The datasets generated and/or analysed during the current study are not publicly available due to institutional ethical policies requiring that all human participant-related data remain within China. However, the data are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request and subject to approval in accordance with these restrictions."
Original Publication Citation
Lee, S. S., Kim, J., Yu, S. W., & Li, N. (2025). College students' identity differences in offline and online learning environment and their effects on achievement motivation. Humanities & Social Sciences Communications, 12(1), 1-12, Article 1579. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-025-05891-9
ORCID
0000-0002-3365-7354 (Kim)
Repository Citation
Lee, Sang-Soog; Kim, Jinhee; Yu, Seung Won; and Li, Na, "College Students' Identity Differences in Offline and Online Learning Environment and Their Effects on Achievement Motivation" (2025). STEMPS Faculty Publications. 405.
https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/stemps_fac_pubs/405
Supplementary Information
Included in
Educational Technology Commons, Online and Distance Education Commons, Social Media Commons