Community of Inquiry Manuscript data.sav
Teachers’ online professional development (PD) has been valued as a crucial and effective way to promote teaching competencies. Forming a professional learning community that allows teachers to learn collectively has been recognized as a means to promote effective PD. Within this realm of research, the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework was deemed a collaborative-constructivist process model that describes successful online learning experiences. The CoI has been associated with many other psychological and educational variables, such as learning achievement and sense of efficacy. This study exploits the CoI framework to assess teachers' online professional learning quality and explores its relationship with teachers’ self-efficacy and online professional learning achievement. 456 teacher participants from Chinese middle schools (439 valid cases with 139 males and 300 females) participated in our study. They responded to a questionnaire containing three separate instruments measuring their assessments of online learning quality (reflected by the CoI instrument score), sense of self-efficacy, and perceived learning achievement. Linear regression, PROCESS Macro mediation, and moderation analyses were run to answer the research questions. The findings of the study revealed a significant relationship between teachers’ online learning quality and their self-efficacy and learning achievement. The mediating roles of self-efficacy and learning achievement were also confirmed. The moderating role of time spent on receiving online professional learning was also recognized. Implications and future directions were discussed. Informed consent to participate was obtained from all individual participants included in the study. Informed consent for publication was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.