Causes, prevention, and interventions regarding classroom disruptions in digital teaching: A systematic review

Abstract

Digitization and the Sars-CoV-2 pandemic are accelerating the use of digital tools in teaching. Therefore, this systematic literature review offers an overview of international studies with a particular focus on classroom disruptions and their causes, as well as on prevention and intervention strategies in digital settings. Selecting out of over 700 published articles from the last 20 years, the results show that, although the research on classroom management in general is numerous, the connection between digitization and classroom disruptions has received little attention so far. Studies of different methodological orientations have been conducted, but strongly teacher-focused. Also, there are conceptual inaccuracies leading to a variety of different findings and interpretations. Thus, this article provides a definition of the term digital teaching and critically discusses the classification of new findings, their emplacement in existing research, as well as their potential to expand existing models. Furthermore, the results summarize causes of disruptions in digital teaching, their possible prevention and intervention strategies.