A Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) Analysis on Educational Psychology Class: The Challenges in Delivering a Fully Online Classroom Environment

In assisting students’ transformation, classes provide activities with face validity. This paper aims to provide readers with a cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) analysis of an Educational Psychology class at a private university in Yogyakarta. Activity theory is a theoretical framework for studying and interpreting human interaction through instruments and objects. It provides a holistic and contextual discovery approach that can be used to help qualitative and interpretive research. Activity theory is especially important in circumstances with a large historical and cultural context and where participants, their goals and tools are in a state of rapid and continuous change. Few studies explored the use of the CHAT framework to reveal the challenges in providing a fully online class in higher education. Therefore, this study intended to explore the practical importance of CHAT for delivering a class in a fully online learning environment. The results revealed the CHAT framework units of analysis (UoA). In addition, the students shared some challenges they faced concerning those units of analysis. The implication of this study is to utilize the CHAT framework as a tool to evaluate the learning process.


Introduction
Every learning-teaching process has activities in some forms to mediate students' transformation. CHAT is the tool that distinguishes and considers physical and abstract tools.
Focusing on internalization can shed light on how tools, information, and practices are appropriated and routinized. By examining the physical tools used, we can understand why certain tools are chosen over others (Allen, Karanasios, & Slavova, 2011). According to CHAT, contradictions are significant aspects of an activity system because CHAT values them as bridges for individuals as well as the entire activity system to develop and transform through a community of practice (Saka, Southerland, & Brooks, 2009). Therefore, it can be used to analyze the activity system in Educational Psychology classes.
Educational psychology is a branch of psychology that studies children in an educational setting and is concerned with teaching and learning methods, cognitive development, and aptitude assessment. In this class, the students are the center of the learning process. As the target class, the Educational Psychology class is one of the subjects for first-semester students. The materials involve learning theories, metacognition, self-regulated learning, multiple intelligences, emotion regulation, motivation, self-efficacy and attribution, constructivism, individual differences, and critical thinking skills. The main weekly learning activities are making a presentation video for each presenting group, discussing the topic of the presentation video, and reviewing journals regarding the topics prior to the discussion session, while the final project is a publishable paper.
participants. In addition, he showed distinct differences between object-oriented activity and goal-directed actions (Yamagata-Lynch, 2010).

Outcome
The outcome is the goal that the activity subjects are expected to achieve. The activities are directed to achieve the outcome (Issroff & Scanlon, 2002;Roth & Lee, 2007;Roth & Tobin, 2002). All means of the activity system play roles in the said alteration through mediation (Gedera, 2015;Nussbaumer, 2012;Postholm, 2015).

Tools
The tools are the media used to ease and assist the processes in conducting the activity.
Tools are used "for revealing the social and material resources that are salient in activity" (Roth & Lee, 2007, p. 197). We intended to use these theoretical tools to highlight what teachers hoped to gain from the activities and whether the supports affected students' development of academic skills and produced reliable test results that could be used to compare and rank students, teachers and their schools. Vygotsky's ideas about learning concentrate on the notion that cultural tools and signs mediate learning activities and that learning is a matter of assisted performance. Engeström's (2015) expanded activity theory offers other analytic tools appropriate for modeling activity systems.

Community
In the community, the activity subjects work together to achieve the objectives. The community allows cooperation with different sets of labor divisions depending on the needs to reach the objectives (Nussbaumer, 2012).

Rule
The rules are made to direct and manage the activities. Without the rules, there might be clashes of interests that prevent or hinder the achievement of the outcomes (Issroff & Scanlon, 2002). The rules are made to prevent those obstacles and maintain order. They can be made by a certain authorized party or group collectively to strike a compromise (Jonassen & Rohrer-Murphy, 1999;Postholm, 2015).
Some previous studies were conducted by utilizing CHAT to evaluate the delivery of learning activities. Engeström, & Pyörälä (2020) shared the utilization of the CHAT framework to evaluate the formative interventions in healthcare. In this case, they could figure out their challenges and the physicians needed to develop collaborative and transformative expertise. In the education context, Gedera (2015) utilized activity theory to evaluate blended learning for university classes. The study exhibited activity theory to identify the tensions and contradictions during blended learning. Postholm (2015) shared the possible methodologies that could be used to implement activity theory for school-based development. As the students are the ones to conduct the activities, they may face some issues in the online learning environment. The students might feel alone in their learning process, as online learning lacks a sense of community (Stewart, 2008;Turner & Hussman, 2008). Concerning the object of the activities, the students might face a huge workload as teachers often substitute the meetings with more assignments (Chong & Reinders, 2020). It can lead to a problem for the students as the tasks from all classes might pile up, causing them to submit tasks after deadlines (Francisco & Barcelona, 2020). The students might also encounter problems with their tools, as not all can have the same facility for their learning (Cojocariu & Boghian, 2014).

Method
This research intended to study the Educational Psychology classroom activities using the CHAT framework. This study is qualitative research using an observational design. The researchers conducted observation and semi-structured interviews to gather the data.
The observation studied the existing data (Streefkerk, 2019). It was conducted on the LMS (www.belajar.usd.ac.id) and the WhatsApp group. The main focus of the observation on those two platforms was to gather information regarding the subject, object, outcomes, community, rules, tools, and divisions of labor. The semi-structured interviews collected information from individuals, particularly the class members. In this study, the interview participants were two students of the Educational Psychology class, selected using convenient sampling (Ary, Jacobs, Sorensen, & Razavieh, 2010).

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The first interview participant (IP01) was a full-time teacher when he joined this class. Therefore, the participant had his preferences, contradictions, and contestations in several aspects of Educational Psychology's classroom management. He was an experienced teacher and aged around 40 years old. On the other hand, the second interview participant (IP02) was also a master's student of English education, and he was just a regular student, though he used to teach at a private school. He was a younger student and around 25 years old. The participants had their preferences, and there are contradictions and contestations in some aspects of management and learning in educational psychology classes.
Both the observation and the semi-structured interviews were performed to gather information about the units of analysis (UoA) of CHAT. The semi-structured interviews were also especially used to discover the challenges in the activities. There were six items in the semistructured interview guideline to figure the students' challenges, based on the theories by Gedera (2015), Nussbaumer (2012), and Postholm (2015). In analyzing the observation data, the units of the analysis found in the LMS and group chat were noted down and coded. After being tabulated, they were grouped based on the UoA categories. The semi-structured interviews were conducted in 30 minutes to an hour. The interview results were then transcribed with nonverbatim transcription. Then, the challenges that the students faced from the interview were also tabulated and coded. The results were then coded and categorized into themes.

The Description of Units of Analysis (UoA)
The UoA consists of the subject, object, outcome, tool, rule, community, and division of labor. From the observation on the LMS, WhatsApp Group (WAG), and sharing moments by considering CHAT, MA-TBLT, and self-regulation theories, the data to describe the UoA were gathered. Below are the descriptions of each unit: Subject. The subjects of these activities are the Master of English Education students and lecturers. Subjects refer to students who used asynchronous discussion forums. As subjects, they Relationship with others. The participant encountered problems in being close with others and knowing them. He did not know the interlocutors' personalities nor how to approach them, so he observed the students and only talked with the familiar ones. He preferred to be contacted first because he felt reluctant to contact others first or pekewuh in Javanese. He did not want to disturb lecturers' private time, though they allowed that for consultation. The online environment hinders students from forming a sense of community, so it is the teachers' role to initiate it (Stewart, 2008).

Division of Labor
Vertical-horizontal Self-regulation