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This article reports the findings of an inductive study on the learning behaviours and language difficulties of a small group of English additional-language students entering a school of chemical and metallurgical engineering in South Africa. Students were interviewed in their home language. While they appeared to have had a reasonable grounding in the basics of effective studying and learning, a range of problematic features were also evident. These included rote learning, a dualistic conception of knowledge, and a problematic degree of dependence on teachers, texts and studying past examination papers. The interlinked nature of these features and the way they seem to derive from educational background suggest that the design of interventions should give particular attention to the "learning practices" of students and be based on developing these practices as a whole rather than the more traditional approach of providing "skills courses". (Contains 2 tables.)

The application of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) education in solving real-world problems is challenging. To tackle this challenge, a project-based learning approach that integrates robots with cost-effective self-made toys to problem-solving was adopted to assist rural primary school students to apply STEM skills. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effects of the project-based learning approach which includes lecturing and hands-on activities on primary school students' STEM learning outcomes and attitudes. An experiment was conducted with 25 primary school students who voluntarily participated in a STEM summer-camp programme. Students were asked to assemble a paper house equipped with an IoT control module and LED light switches, and write and edit robot scripts to produce a robot-based storytelling narrative using the paper house they made as a context. The results show that the project-based learning approach was an effective approach for cultivating primary school students' STEM knowledge and skills as evidenced from the post-written test. The relationships between the students' STEM learning outcomes and attitudes were also confirmed by a clustering analysis. Students who had higher learning attitudes also achieved higher STEM learning outcomes; the findings are also supported by the feedback from the open-ended questionnaire items. This study suggests that integrating low-cost self-made toys and robots in project-based learning activities is an effective and practical approach to enhance primary school students' learning outcomes and learning attitudes in STEM education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The substantial growth in gamification research has connected gamified learning to enhanced engagement, improved performance, and greater motivation. Similar to gamification, personalized learning analytics dashboards can enhance student engagement. Objectives: This study explores the student experiences and academic achievements using a gamified dashboard in a large, introductory STEM course. Methods: We examined two groups of students enrolled in different sections of a one‐semester‐long physical geology course with a total enrollment of 223 students. The only difference between the groups was that one had access to the dashboard. The data collection included students' assignments, overall performances, and exam scores. Students in both sections completed a Science Literacy Concept Inventory survey at the beginning and end of the term. Additionally, students completed an end‐of‐term survey containing open‐ended questions on their experience and interactions with specific elements. Results: Students shared mostly positive comments about their experience with the dashboard, and the final grade of students with access to the dashboard was 13% higher, on average, compared to their peers in the non‐dashboard section. Conclusion: With low costs and little time invested, gamified dashboards could have a significant impact on student performance in large STEM lecture courses. Lay Description: What is already known about this topic: Leaner dashboards that provide personalized feedback are linked to improved student performance in undergraduate STEM courses. However, students may be reticent to adopt dashboards, especially students in the middle range of the performance distribution, for whom the impact of the dashboard may be most significant.Prior research on gamification in STEM courses suggests that adding gameful elements like progress trackers, badges, and rewards can increase students' engagement in undergraduate coursework.The combination of personalized learning in dashboards and the motivational experience of gamification should boost student engagement, dashboard adoption, and ultimately foster academic achievement. What this paper adds: In this paper, we examine the differences in academic performance between students with and without access to a gamified learning dashboard in an undergraduate Geology course.We observe that students with access to the dashboard (the treatment group), outperform students without access (the control group). The greatest benefit is observed for students who use the dashboard more frequently.Students reported that the progress tracker, the badges, and the rewards all incentivized their use and provided useful feedback about their performance. Students who did not adopt the dashboard expressed a need for more detail about the tool and its purpose. Implications for practice and/or policy: Instructors and instructional designers for large enrollment undergraduate STEM courses should consider the affordances of gamified learner dashboards for increasing engagement and for providing synchronous feedback about learners' strategies in the course.Aligning the dashboard to the content of the curriculum—by ensuring that badges reflect key concepts‐ encouraged participation and helped students identify the utility of the tool. Dashboards should be personalized to individuals and to the course.Adding gameful elements in a low‐cost intervention for increasing adoption and engagement of dashboards in large enrollment introductory courses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how the use of smartphones vs. laptops influences students' engagement, behaviour and experience watching academic videos in a collaborative classroom. Experiments were run in authentic teaching sessions with a total of 483 first-year higher education students. The methodology applied is a quasi-experimental design with post-test-only, being the independent variable, the device used to visualise the academic videos. Results indicate that the use of laptops has provided better results in terms of student's engagement with the videos, their collaborative behaviour and satisfaction with the device. Hence, the findings of this research suggest that the type of mobile device used in activities that consider the use of videos in a collaborative class need to be carefully chosen to maximise the student's comfortability – and in consequence, their engagement with the video-based learning activity and their positive behaviour and experience within the collaborative context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Learning a foreign language requires interaction with language input while involved in a task. Given that problem‐based learning (PBL) offers hands‐on application in realistic contexts, and that virtual reality (VR) enables learners to interact with multiple modalities of information, this study examines how the integration of VR technology into PBL contexts affects students' motivation for, problem‐solving during, and vocabulary acquisition in learning English as a foreign language (EFL). A total of 84 engineering majors who enrolled in a course of English for specific purposes were randomly assigned to either an experimental group or a control group. Students in the experimental group participated in a VR‐assisted PBL context, in which they were to view a PBL scenario using VR technology and then to create VR videos about solving the given problems. Those in the control group participated in a PBL context without the use of VR technology for viewing and solving the identical scenario. After the intervention, all the students wrote a problem‐solving analysis, took a vocabulary knowledge test, completed a learning motivation questionnaire, and participated in individual interviews. The results showed that the students in the experimental group significantly outperformed those in the control group in terms of vocabulary acquisition, and were more motivated to learn English related to their future careers, whereas there was no significant difference in the problem‐solving performance of the two groups. Implications of these findings highlight the value of engaging EFL learners in immersive environments for contextualized learning through the integrated use of VR and PBL. Lay Description: What is already known about this topic?: Virtual reality (VR) technology has been shown to enhance students' knowledge and skills in STEM fields.Problem‐based learning (PBL) has been widely used in medical education but not so much in foreign language education.English as a foreign language (EFL) students usually have very limited access to the target language beyond the classroom, thus lack a motivating reason for them to learn English after graduation. What this paper adds?: The VR‐assisted PBL approach proposed in this study was found to significantly enhance the EFL students' specialized vocabulary knowledge.The VR‐assisted PBL approach was found to motivate and sustain the EFL students' interest in career English.Exposing the EFL students to PBL contexts was capable of developing their problem‐solving performance, regardless of VR integration. Implications for practice and/or policy: The proposed approach has the potential to facilitate student learning in EFL education, particularly English for occupational purposes.EFL educators may apply the VR‐assisted PBL approach to narrow the gap between language classrooms and workplace contexts by immersing students in authentic contexts that were relevant to their occupational knowledge and workplace English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The university course of Bioprocess Engineering is designed to introduce the student to the principles of Biochemical Engineering. The students acquire a global understanding of the biochemical processes. A new teaching methodology, very different from that which was common 30 years ago with non-participatory lectures and classes based on taking notes, was established. In this paper these new teaching strategies have been described. Moreover, the results obtained in the interviews realized along the course in order to determine the satisfaction of the students have been showed. The obtained results permit to verify the total integration of the students into the system, participating and proposing numerous activities. Students were satisfied with new teaching methodology developed in the pilot experience and most of them wished to continue using these new strategies. Summing up, we can conclude that the teaching and learning course was successful. In addition, we detected that the knowledge of methods, practical applications and the reality of biotechnology was increased significantly with this methodology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to identify utilization schemes developed by students and teachers in their interaction with educational workstations in the electronic measurement and instrumentation laboratory at the Department of Electrical Engineering in the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), Brazil. After that, these schemes were used to design a new workstation. For this, it was important to bear in mind that the mentioned artifacts contain two key characteristics: (1) one from the designers themselves, resulting from their experience and their technical knowledge of what they are designing and (2) the experience from users and the means through which they take advantage of and develop these artifacts, in turn rendering them appropriate to perform the proposed task - the utilization schemes developed in the process of mediation between the user and the artifact. The satisfactory fusion of these two points makes these artifacts a functional unit - the instruments. This research aims to demonstrate that identifying the utilization schemes by taking advantage of user experience and incorporating this within the design, facilitates its appropriation and, consequently, its efficiency as an instrument of learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education is recognized as a top school education priority worldwide and Inquiry-based teaching and learning is identified as a promising approach. To effectively engage students in Inquiry tasks, appropriate guidance should be provided, usually by combining digital tools such online labs and modeling tools. This is a cumbersome task for teachers, since it involves manually assessing the type/level of tool-supported guidance to be provided and potentially refining these to meet guidance needs of individual students. In our research we target to investigate how to support this systematic reflection process with educational data analytics methods and tools from both the design and the delivery of Inquiry-based educational designs (IED). The contribution of this paper is to propose a novel "Teaching and Learning" Analytics method and research prototype tool, extending the scope of purely learning analytics methods, to analyze IED in terms of the tool-supported guidance they offer and relate these analyses to students' educational data that are already being collected by existing learning analytics systems, increasing teachers' awareness. A two-layer evaluation methodology positively assessed the capacity of our method to analyze IED and provided initial evidence that the insights generated offer statistically significant indicators that impact students' activity during the delivery of these IED. The insights of this work aim to contribute in the field of cognitive data analytics for teaching and learning, by investigating new ways to combine analyses of the educational design and students' activity, and inform teachers' reflection from a holistic perspective. Highlights • Tool-supported Guidance is essential for effective Inquiry-based education. • Teaching and Learning Analytics (TLA) can support teachers provide appropriate Guidance. • The TLA method and supporting tool provides analyses of the level of Guidance in Inquiry-based scenarios. • Analyses of the design can be investigated against customizable learners' data and profiles. • Insights from these combined analyses could help teachers improve their teaching designs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Internationally, innovation represents the lifeblood of modern economies. In particular, there is growing recognition of the vital role of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) educators in developing students' innovation skills for the jobs of the future. Work-integrated learning (WIL) has emerged as an important pedagogical approach for developing innovation capabilities. This paper is based on a quantitative study that examines the key factors driving innovation in STEM WIL students. The study undertakes a comparative analysis of students by age, gender, degree type, and placement duration. It found that students participating in longer durations of 20 weeks compared to 12 weeks had higher perceived levels of innovation skills. The study shows how feedback on skills can be provided to students and employers, with output from the tool used in this study. Therefore, it has implications for student career literacy, industry outreach and WIL program development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: Visual model comprehension and application are important for success in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) courses. As educational materials shift to primarily digital content with dynamic interactive visuals, students with visual impairments are at risk for being disadvantaged, since few interactives are born accessible. To fill this gap of accessible digital STEM learning tools, we designed and tested the Kasi Learning System. Kasi uses tactile manipulatives and computer vision with audio-based augmented reality algorithms to provide a multisensory experience of an interactive digital image. Methods: Ten high school students who are visually impaired (ie, blind or have low vision) participated in an underpowered random control study to evaluate the feasibility and usability of Kasi by completing an active learning lesson. The control group was instructed by a human, whereas the Kasi group was instructed by a computer. Follow-up interviews with both students and their instructors provided further insight. Results: Comparing the experiences of the two groups suggests that Kasi is an effective instructor for completing the activity. Comparison of students who chose to use braille versus large-print pieces revealed that braille users found the system to be easier to use. Discussion: All students efficiently identified the pieces. Regarding the audio, students who do not typically use a screen reader repeated the prompts more frequently and took longer to adapt to the system. Those in the Kasi group demonstrated increased engagement as shown by the increase in submitted answers. Overall, Kasi users' performance improved significantly during the lesson. Implications for Practitioners: Kasi is most readily adapted and used by those who do not rely on vision. However, students with low vision may benefit from using a tool like Kasi earlier in their schooling to strengthen their auditory and tactile skills. Kasi appears to have the potential to provide students independence in studying STEM diagrams. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we investigated the validity of a stealth assessment of physics understanding in an educational game, as well as the effectiveness of different game‐level delivery methods and various in‐game supports on learning. Using a game called Physics Playground, we randomly assigned 263 ninth‐ to eleventh‐grade students into four groups: adaptive, linear, free choice and no‐treatment control. Each condition had access to the same in‐game learning supports during gameplay. Results showed that: (a) the stealth assessment estimates of physics understanding were valid—significantly correlating with the external physics test scores; (b) there was no significant effect of game‐level delivery method on students' learning; and (c) physics animations were the most effective (among eight supports tested) in predicting both learning outcome and in‐game performance (e.g. number of game levels solved). We included student enjoyment, gender and ethnicity in our analyses as moderators to further investigate the research questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The development of graduate attributes through structured planning of linked reflective reviews of problem-based learning is evaluated. Data is obtained by summarising students' reflections-on-action in their evidence-based review claims and on their forward planning, based on immediate reflection-for-action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Students in psychology are often surveyed for personality. Empirical results show relevance of this topic, because personality influences academic success. In contrast, we know much less about the personality of students of cooperative education. So, we collected data from 5,863 students at Baden-Wuerttemberg Cooperative State University in August 2016. Multivariate analysis of covariance (MANCOVA) indicated that gender (partial η² = .06), academic field (partial η² = .01) and covariate university entrance scores (partial η² = .05) have an effect on Big Five personality traits controlling age and social class. The results can be used for selecting students in cooperative education for academic fields and compare them with other types of study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]