A Study on the Empathy Competence of Adolescents Using Empathic Reading Based on Online Remote Classes

Abstract

The study is aimed at designing an effective edutech platform based on online remote classes, and clarifying the effect of empathy competence of youths through the operation linked with the empathic reading program focusing on reading. To this end, after constructing the environment for education and drawing a class model based on components of edutech for remote classes on the basis of previous studies and elaborating the empathic reading education program, this study has been conducted for one semester for 107 students in 4 classes in their 1st grade at S middle school, Gyeonggi-do in order to apply them to fields. As a result of the study, the empathy reading program that a remote class model was applied has shown a meaningful difference among groups in cognitive empathy and emotional empathy, and it was found that there was a statistically meaningful difference between the two groups in total scores. Besides, the effect and meaning of adolescents’ empathy competence have been verified through the remote empathy reading education and the empirical analysis, and the direction to develop the empathy reading program has been suggested for a solution to settle differences in students’ learning due to COVID-19.