Abstract

COVID-19 generated new forms of student-teacher interactions, and it increased the use of virtual educational environments. Electronic messaging is one of the most widely used forms of communication between teachers and students. However, few studies on how teachers provide feedback motivate and encourage students to engage in academic activities in online learning environments. This study aims to characterize messages sent by university teachers to their students with low academic performance during the emergency remote teaching in the COVID-19 pandemic context. The electronic messages were obtained through the snowball sampling technique. The sample consisted of eighteen email threads facilitated by six universities. Ethical requirements for this type of research were met, and discourse or text analysis was used as a methodology with a qualitative approach and hermeneutic orientation. This study shows two main results. First, the necessary data to identify students with low academic performance can be mainly obtained from their teachers and third parties, like university authorities. Second, there are a number of elements to consider when creating messages to improve the engagement of underperforming students. These fundamental elements are: tone of voice, content of the message and moment in which the message is sent. Messages that are explicitly written for each student or group of students and messages that were written with anticipation, showed to be most effective in engaging students.