Exploring interactive behaviours of urban and rural teachers in blended synchronous classrooms: Insights from a proposed interaction analysis framework

Blended synchronous classrooms (BSCs) play a critical role in narrowing the educational gap between urban and rural areas in China, promoting educational equity. In BSCs, the quantity and quality of interactive teaching behaviours of urban and rural teachers may significantly influence the learning experiences of students in both urban and rural settings, and they are supposed to be different from interactive teaching behaviours that happen in traditional classrooms. However, there is limited research on the characteristics of such interactive teaching behaviours in BSCs. To address the gap, this study first proposed an interaction analysis framework for BSCs (IAF4BSCs) and then examined the interactive teaching behaviours of urban and rural teachers in BSCs using this framework, along with various learning analytics methods including lag sequential analysis, frequent sequence mining and thematic analysis. The data analysis yielded the following results: (1) Urban teachers exhibited more speech behaviours such as lecturing and providing immediate feedback, whereas rural teachers engaged more in non-speech behaviours like classroom patrols. (2) Despite the expectation for urban teachers to interact equally with urban and rural students in BSCs, they predominantly focused on urban students. (3) Urban teachers demonstrated diverse interaction sequences with both urban and rural students, whereas rural teachers primarily interacted with rural students. (4) Interviews with teachers and students revealed both positive and negative aspects of interactive teaching behaviours in BSCs. Based on these findings, the study proposed three pedagogical recommendations to enhance interactive teaching behaviours in BSCs: increasing interactive participation, integrating technology more effectively and emphasizing post-class assessment.