Search

Background: The feedback offered to students in audience response systems may enhance conformity bias, while asking closed-type questions alone does not allow students to externalize and elaborate on their knowledge. Objectives: The study explores how writing short justifications and accessing peer justifications as collective feedback could affect students' performance, confidence and opinions in multiple-choice audience response systems that apply the Peer Instruction model of voting/revoting. Methods: For 8 weeks, 98 students, enrolled in an undergraduate course, attended each lecture following a flipped classroom approach. At the beginning of each lecture, students participated in a quiz with eight multiple-choice questions. Four of these questions included a justification form in which students could elaborate on their answers. The students were randomly grouped into two conditions according to the collective feedback they received: the Shared group (n = 54) could see both the percentage each question choice received from the class and the respective peer justifications, while the Unshared group (n = 44) could only see the percentage information. Results: Analysis showed that students in both groups performed significantly better in questions with the justification form being available. Also, the two groups were comparable in terms of performance and self-reported level of confidence suggesting no main effect for making peer justification available. Despite this, students in the Shared group expressed a significantly more positive opinion in the end-of-activity questionnaire in terms of perceived learning gains and the helpfulness of writing justifications for their answers. Take Away: Writing short justifications can have a positive impact on students' academic performance.

The aim of the present study (n = 113) was to examine how (objective and subjective) information on peers' preparation, confidence, and past performance can support students in answering correctly in audience response systems (aka clickers). The result analysis shows that in the "challenging" questions, in which answers diverged, students who received additional information about peers' self-reported preparation and/or confidence outperformed students who were only given the objective percentage with or without past performance feedback. In addition, students expressed a positive attitude towards the activity, commenting its usefulness in better understanding course material and identifying misconceptions.

Aim/Purpose: This study aimed to explore whether students' self-reported use of various learning strategies affected their perceptions on different course activities as well as their perceived performance in terms of both cognitive learning outcomes and general skills. Background: In a highly active learning environment that incorporates research into teaching, the effective use of various learning strategies is considered of high importance for the successful engagement of students. Yet, this line of research has mainly focused on individual learning. Shifting from individual to collaborative learning settings, the current study investigated whether students' use of self-regulated learning, peer learning, and help seeking strategies influenced their perceptions on both the group activities and the respective outcomes. Methodology: At the beginning of the course, 81 first semester postgraduate students self-reported the level of use of self-regulated learning, peer learning, and help seeking strategies by filling in the respective subscales of the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (MSLQ). Then, groups of 3 or 4 students were formed and instructed to create several learning artifacts of different types and conduct a peer-tutoring session, based on a topic assigned to them by the teacher. Additionally, the same groups conducted a research project of their own choice within course topics. Students' final grade served as an indicator of their academic performance. At the end of the semester, students filled in a questionnaire eliciting their perceptions on the process and the outputs of the course activities. Finally, through statistical analysis of students' responses to the questionnaires, the influence of learning strategies on students' perceptions and their academic performance was examined. Contribution: Our findings contribute to the literature regarding the research-teaching nexus in higher education settings. More specifically, the study shows how students' self-reported use of learning strategies affects students' perceptions on the activities they were engaged in, their achievement of cognitive learning outcomes, and their skills development in a research-integrated course design. Findings: Students perceived differently the value of producing and studying learning artifacts. Students who scored higher in the self-regulated learning and peer learning subscales of MSLQ perceived their role as more active in the preparation of the presentation for the peer-tutoring session, which was the artifact that required higher level of interaction among the group members. Students' final grades were influenced partially by their self-reported use of different learning strategies. Recommendations for Practitioners: Integrating research into teaching through the assignment of research-related tasks to students can promote students' acquisition of domain knowledge and research skills. The merits of this approach can be further strengthened by having students working in groups and providing the outputs of their involvement in the research-related activities as learning material for their peers. Furthermore, students' individual characteristics (e.g., use of learning strategies and preferences should be taken into account when designing course activities). Recommendations for Researchers: Researchers should continue to explore the way that various learning strategies influence different aspects of the learning process, especially in the achievement of cognitive learning outcomes and the development of general skills. Impact on Society: Creating learning environments that foster students' active engagement with the course material and peer collaboration should be a vital goal of higher education institutes as it can improve students' performance and promote the necessary skills for self-directed and autonomous learning, a key competence in the modern workplace. Future Research: In this study, both cognitive learning outcomes and general skills were assessed by students' final grade. In a future study, distinguishing these different types of learning outcomes would allow us to examine in more detail the impact of students' learning strategies and course activities on the accomplishment of cognitive learning outcomes and general skills.

Background Objectives Method Results Conclusion Sustaining productive student–student dialogue in online collaborative inquiry learning is challenging, and teacher support is limited when needed in multiple groups simultaneously. Collaborative conversational agents (CCAs) have been used in the past to support student dialogue. Yet, research is needed to reveal the characteristics and effectiveness of such agents.To investigate the extent to which our analytics‐based Collaborative Learning Agent for Interactive Reasoning (Clair) can improve the productivity of student dialogue, we assessed both the levels at which students shared thoughts, listened to each other, deepened reasoning, and engaged with peer's reasoning, as well as their perceived productivity in terms of their learning community, accurate knowledge, and rigorous thinking.In two separate studies, 19 and 27 dyads of secondary school students from Brazil and the Netherlands, respectively, participated in digital inquiry‐based science lessons. The dyads were assigned to two conditions: with Clair present (treatment) or absent (control) in the chat. Sequential pattern mining of chat logs and the student's responses to a questionnaire were used to evaluate Clair's impact.Analysis revealed that in both studies, Clair's presence resulted in dyads sharing their thoughts at a higher frequency compared to dyads that did not have Clair. Additionally, in the Netherlands' study, Clair's presence led to a higher frequency of students engaging with each other's reasoning. No differences were observed in students' perceived productivity.This work deepens our understanding of how CCAs impact student dialogue and illustrates the importance of a multidimensional perspective in analysing the role of CCAs in guiding student dialogue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study analyses the impact of self and peer feedback in technology-enhanced peer review settings. The impact of receiving peer comments ("receiver" perspective) is compared to that of reaching own insights by reviewing others' work ("giver" perspective). In this study, 38 sophomore students were randomly assigned in two conditions and engaged in peer review activity facilitated by a web-based learning environment asking them to provide multiple reviews. In the Peer Reviewed (PR) condition students both reviewed peer work and received peer comments for their own work. By contrast, in the Self Reviewed (SR) condition students provided peer reviews, but did not receive any. Instead, they were asked to perform self reviewing, before proceeding to any revisions of their work. Result showed that the two groups were comparable in all aspects, suggesting that the lack of getting peer reviews can be efficiently alleviated by other type of scaffolds such as a scripted self review process. Overall, the study provides evidence that the review "giver" perspective (as opposed to the typical "receiver" perspective) is a vital option and has noteworthy implications for the design of technological systems that aim to flexibly support more efficient peer review schemes.

Conversational agents that draw on the framework of academically productive talk (APT) have been lately shown to be effective in helping learners sustain productive forms of peer dialogue in diverse learning settings. Yet, literature suggests that more research is required on how learners respond to and benefit from such flexible agents in order to fine-tune the design of automated APT intervention modes and, thus, enhance agent pedagogical efficacy. Building on this line of research, this work explores the impact of a configurable APT agent that prompts peers to build on prior knowledge and logically connect their contributions to important domain concepts discussed in class. A total of 96 computer science students engaged in a dialogue-based activity in the context of a Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) university course. During the activity, students worked online in dyads to accomplish a learning task. The study compares three conditions: students who collaborated without any agent interference (control), students who received undirected agent interventions that addressed both peers in the dyad (U treatment), and students who received directed agent interventions addressing a particular learner instead of the dyad (D treatment). The results suggest that although both agent intervention methods can improve students' learning outcomes and dyad in-task performance, the directed one is more effective than the undirected one in enhancing individual domain knowledge acquisition and explicit reasoning. Furthermore, findings show that the positive effect of the agent on dyad performance is mediated by the frequency of students' contributions displaying explicit reasoning, while most students perceive agent involvement favorably.

This study provides field research evidence on the efficiency of a "free-selection" peer review assignment protocol as compared to the typically implemented "assigned-pair" protocol. The study employed 54 sophomore students who were randomly assigned into three groups: Assigned-Pair (AP) (the teacher assigns student works for review to student pairs), Free-Selection (FS) (students are allowed to freely explore and select peer work for review), and No Review (NR) (control group). AP and FS student groups studied and reviewed peer work in the domain of Computer Networking, supported by a web-based environment designed to facilitate the two peer review protocols. Our results indicate that students following the Free Selection protocol demonstrate (a) better domain learning outcomes, and (b) better reviewer skills, compared to the AP condition. Overall, the study analyzes the benefits and shortcomings of the FS vs AP review assignment protocol, providing evidence that the FS condition can be multiply beneficial to students who engage in peer review activities. (Contains 5 tables and 3 figures.)

This study investigates the effectiveness of two variants of a prompting strategy that guides students to focus on important issues when learning in an ill-structured domain. Students in three groups studied individually Software Project Management (SPM) cases for a week, using a web-based learning environment designed especially for this purpose. The first group (control) studied the cases without any prompting. The second group ("writing mode") studied the same cases, while prompted to provide written answers to a set of knowledge integration prompts meant to engage students in deeper processing of the material. The third group ("thinking mode") studied the cases, while prompted only to think of possible answers to the same question prompts. Results indicated that students in the writing condition group outperformed the others in both domain knowledge acquisition and knowledge transfer post-test items. Several students in the thinking condition group skipped the question prompts, while those that reported having reflected on the material were unable to achieve high performance comparable to the writing condition group. Overall, the study provides evidence that the implementation of prompting techniques in technology-enhanced learning environments may lead to improved outcomes, when combined with the requirement that students provide their answers in writing.

This paper presents the rationale behind the utilization of a Moodle Learning Management System for the facilitation of a blended learning approach in the Informatics department. The authors present and analyze the steps followed in order to replace the prior decentralized organizational structure of the courses, which consisted of a multitude of different and incompatible systems. The main goal was to implement a single system, which would be easy to operate, maintain, and update, and would cater to the variety of instructor and student needs. Furthermore, evaluation data of the new system is presented in detail. The analysis of the results serves to confirm the success of this department-wide migration. (Contains 2 tables and 5 figures.)

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of question prompts on student learning in relation to their learning styles. The context of the study is technology-enhanced learning in an ill-structured domain. Design/methodology/approach: The study conditions were the same for all the students in the four learning style groups. Student learning style was the independent variable, while students' attitudes and task performance were the dependent variables of the study. Pre-test treatment post-test method was used. Students studied in a web-based learning environment during treatment. Findings: The integration of question prompts as student supporting tool in technology-enhanced learning environments might not improve learning for all students alike independent of their learning styles. Research limitations/implications: Small uneven groups because the researcher has no control over the student distribution across the different learning style profiles. Practical implications: The suggestion for designers is to consider combining prompting with other scaffolding methods, in order to effectively support all students independent of their learning styles. Originality/value: The paper combines learning in ill-structured domains through cases and a scaffolding method based on question prompts focusing on contextual elements. The results of the study inform the designers of TELEs that although prompting can be generally helpful, parameters such as the students' learning style are able to limit the cognitive benefit emerging from the prompting intervention. (Contains 2 tables.)

This study was designed to investigate the impact of question prompts that guide students to focus on context-related issues when learning through cases in an ill-structured domain. Three groups of undergraduate students studied cases during a lab-session time period using a web-based environment. The first group studied without any question prompts. The second group studied the same material while prompted to provide written answers to embedded questions in the cases. The third group studied while having only to think of possible answers for the question prompts. In this study, we explored how the questioning intervention affected students' conceptual knowledge of the domain and their problem-solving ability. Post-tests did not reveal significant statistical differences in the groups' performance, indicating that under specific study conditions the prompting impact is not traceable in the learning outcomes. This result, however, is discussed in the light of a previous study, which showed that this context-oriented prompting method had a beneficial effect on student learning in a prolonged study-time setting, where students were able to self-regulate their study activity.