Learning at any time: Supporting student learning wherever it happens

A new residential college and a faculty-in-residence program demonstrate how student affairs educators and academic faculty at one institution have collaborated to create transformational learning experiences for their students.     

Supporting self-regulated hypermedia learning through prompts

The aim of this research was to develop and evaluate tools and supports for self-regulated learning with hypertext information structures, such as Web pages. Two kinds of supports for self-regulated learning were developed and tested experimentally: Prompting and Prompting with Training. In Experiment 1, Prompting was tested with a pre-post-test between subject design, including thinking-aloud data. Students of the experimental group (n = 20) were prompted for self-regulation activities that had to be followed while learning basic learning theory. No self-regulation support was offered in the control group (n = 20). In Experiment 2 (Prompting with Training), the experimental group (n = 20) received a short training, in addition to the prompting: the self-regulated learning activities were explained in detail, demonstrated and practiced right before the learning session. Again, no self-regulation support was offered in the control group (n = 20). Analyses of learning processes and learning outcomes confirm partly the positive effects of both measures of self-regulated learning prompts. The more extended measure (with training) had superior effects on students’ learning transfer performance and acceptance. Implications for the design of instructional support to improve self-regulated learning with computer-based learning environments are discussed.     

Supporting students to develop collaborative learning skills in technology-based environments

The paper focuses on the question of how to advance collaboration through the Web and support lifelong learning. First, the theoretical framework and architecture of a new web‐based tool, the ‘IQ Team’, is introduced. IQ Team is an interactive online assessment and support system to learn social skills needed in cooperative work, and belongs in an interactive online assessing and tutoring system, ‘IQ Form’, developed for the Finnish Virtual University. IQ Team has three main elements: (1) interactive self‐evaluation test banks, (2) online tutoring sets and (3) learning diaries. In the creation of IQ Team, the validation process was conducted with two samples (n = 259 and n = 275). The online students’ social skills in different groups were explored, and the feedback data from different user groups were analysed. The online students scored high values for social skills, and no differences were discerned between university, Open University and technical students. The qualitative data (n = 35) were collected in order to get users’ feedback of the tool. The qualitative data consisted of interviews, open‐ended questions and online discussions. The users of IQ Team reflected that the tool benefited them to become aware of their group work skills and developed their collaborative learning skills. IQ Team provides a powerful tool for online instruction and communication in higher education and in the Open University to promote joint‐regulated learning.     

Productive engagements with student difference: Supporting equity through cultural recognition

In this paper, the focus is on how a group of Australian educators support student equity through cultural recognition. Young's theorising of justice is drawn on to illuminate the problematic impacts arising from the group's efforts to value students’ cultural difference associated, for example, with quantifying justice along distributive lines and with essentialising student difference as negation and lack within a frame of cultural imperialism. These theoretical tools draw attention to, and support a critical examination of, the social rules and relations within the school that create barriers to equity. Towards reconciling discrepancies relating to how student difference might best be supported, the paper endorses the prevailing imperative of centring students’ perspectives and experiences. Such centring remains crucial to educators recognising the partiality and interest within their attempts to ‘help’ marginalised students and disrupting the relations of teacher privilege and authority that reinscribe domination, control and exclusion.     

In practice: Enriching the student learning experience through community service learning

Cecil D. Bradfield and R. Ann Myers are professors of sociology and social work at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia, where they cofounded the JMU Center for Service-Learning. The Center is noteworthy in its dedication to (and success in) serving equally the academic learning needs of students and the needs of the community. Here Bradfield and Myers describe the Center and at the same time examine what makes service learning different from community service.     

Individual differences in negative group work experiences in collaborative student learning

This paper reports the development of the Negative Group Work Experiences questionnaire (NGWE), an assessment tool for measuring negative experiences of group work. Study 1 involved two samples of undergraduate psychology students (second‐year sample n = 425; first‐year sample n = 443), who completed research modules incorporating substantial elements of assessed group work. Participants completed a 39‐item inventory designed to measure their negative experiences of group work as part of their general module evaluation. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis of the second‐year sample indicated four interpretable and reliable factors: lack of group commitment, group fractionation, task disorganisation, and storming. Confirmatory factor analysis of the first‐year data set confirmed and cross‐validated the factor structure of the second‐year sample. Study 2 (n > 254) confirmed the criterion validity of the NGWE. The NGWE is proposed as a useful tool for evaluating group processes, especially in large group teaching which involves collaborative group work.     

Supporting student learning: the use of computer–based formative assessment modules

This paper describes the development of a variety of computer–based assessment opportunities, both formative and summative, that are available to a large first year biology class at The University of Sydney. These materials include: weekly quizzes; a mock exam; quiz sections in tutorials; and special self–assessment modules (SAMs). The weekly quiz is password protected and secure but the remaining materials are available on–line from a Virtual Learning Environment (http://FYBio.bio.usyd.edu.au/VLE/L1/). Evaluations over a number of years of the use and usefulness of the formative assessment materials indicate that the student population is making significant use of materials and that these materials are helping students in their learning     

Improving learning environments through whole-school collaborative action research

Learning Environments Research - The focus of professional learning on activities has changed to internal growth or change among teachers. Our 3-year whole-school collaborative action research was...     

Professional learning through the collaborative design of problem-solving lessons

This article analyses lesson study as a mode of professional learning, focused on the development of mathematical problem solving processes, using the lens of cultural-historical activity theory. In particular, we draw attention to two activity systems, the classroom system and the lesson-study system, and the importance of making artefacts instrumental in both. We conceptualise the lesson plan as a boundary object and use this to illustrate how professional learning takes place through the introduction of carefully designed artefacts that draw on teachers’ professional knowledge of potential student approaches, and to the nature of progression in problem-solving processes. We identify the roles of instrumentalisation and instrumentation in supporting professional learning as these artefacts are prepared for use before a lesson and as they are again used as catalysts for reflection in post-lesson discussions. These artefacts are seen to effectively facilitate the socially situated learning of all participants. We conclude that the design of artefacts as boundary objects that support teaching and professional learning in their respective activity systems may be fundamental to the success of lesson study as a collaborative venture.     

Supporting foreign language learning for a blind student: a case study from Coventry University

This article outlines the adjustments made to provide an accessible learning environment within the first‐year undergraduate curriculum of the languages degree course at Coventry University. Marina Orsini‐Jones, Kathy Courtney and Anne Dickinson describe how language staff collaborated with the Centre for Higher Education Development and the Teaching and Learning Support Unit both to raise awareness amongst all students about accessibility issues and to adapt materials for a blind student reading French, German and Spanish. The article includes a discussion of the challenges faced, and provides an action plan for future adjustments to the languages materials in line with the lesson learnt from the case study.     

Supporting student projects at a distance through ICT: The UK Open University approach

In recent years the British Open University has been providing increasing ICT support to distance learners carrying out projects within the Faculty of Technology and elsewhere in the University. This paper reports three generic support tools: (1) a CD-ROM providing general guidance on planning, carrying out and writing up a final-year undergraduate technology project; (2) the electronic Information Search Guide , designed as a user-friendly front end to a variety of web sites, bibliographic databases, electronic journals and other information sources; and (3) ROUTES (Resources for Open University Teachers and Students), a library service providing access to selected, quality-assessed, Internet resources for Open University courses, searchable by course or keyword. By means of such tools, distance learners can enjoy resources for project work similar (or, in some aspects, even superior) to those of their face-to-face counterparts, including online access to the full text of many journals. This paper reports the current state of (1) and (3), and work in progress on (2). The CD-ROM was designed initially for the comparatively small numbers of students (up to 100 per year) carrying out a final-year, 600-h undergraduate project. It is now offered to many other students taking projects, and is also being developed - as is the Information Search Guide - in support of a new, 300-h project course planned to attract over 1000 students per year. ROUTES currently provides course-specific World Wide Web links for over 100 courses throughout the University, and is expanding rapidly.     

Discontinuities in university student experiences of learning through discussions

This article reports on research into the student experience of learning through discussions in a third‐year undergraduate engineering subject. Information engineering students studying e‐commerce were required to engage in face‐to‐face and online discussions as a key aspect of their learning experience. This study investigates the quality of the experience of learning through those discussions using quantitative methodologies from Student Learning Research. Analyses of student ratings on the closed‐ended questionnaires identify qualitatively different approaches to learning through discussions, both in face‐to‐face contexts and online. Relationships are found among the variation in the quality of these approaches and how students perceive issues such as workload, what they thought they were learning through discussions and performance. Implications arising from these results identify different suggestions for teaching students to discuss successfully in different contexts.     

Toward professional practice: student learning opportunities through participation in engineering clubs

ABSTRACT

Clubs constitute a prominant co-curricular activity to prepare students for effective professional careers, yet the role of engineering clubs in students' professional formation is poorly understood. This qualitative, comparative case study investigated three student engineering clubs at a large American public university. The clubs included a domestic chemical reaction car competition; a formula racing club that partners with a German team and competes both domestically and internationally; and a humanitarian engineering club centred on service learning projects in developing countries. Data collection included semi-structured interviews with participants (N?=?19) and observations of club work sessions (N?=?27). Using Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) as the analytical framework, the transcribed interviews were coded to characterise the activity in each club. The findings demonstrate that a confluence of elements, especially decision-making rules and division of labour, leads to a fundamentally distinct activity system in each club. Consequently, each club differs in the ways it influences students’ professional formation. More generally, this study illustrates the potential of CHAT for analysis of co-curricular activity that can lead to alternative approaches to activity design.     

Interactive learning through web-mediated peer review of student science reports

Two studies analyzed impacts of writing and receiving web-mediated peer reviews on revision of research reports by undergraduate science students. After conducting toxicology experiments, 77 students posted draft reports and exchanged double-blind reviews. The first study randomly assigned students to four groups representing full, partial, or no peer review. Students engaging in any aspect of peer review made more revisions than students confined to reviewing their own reports. In the second study, all students engaged in peer review, and the influence of writing versus receiving critiques was analyzed using linear regression. Both studies showed receiving reviews to be more significant than writing them in terms of triggering report revisions. Students valued the peer review experience and credited it with giving them insights about their work. Conclusions address implications for optimal design of online peer review systems and for further research into student learning gains.

Supporting learning with interactive multimedia through active integration of representations

When learners explore dynamic and interactive visualisations they are often not able to interact with them in a systematic and goal-oriented way. Frequently, even supporting learners in processes of discovery learning does not lead to better learning outcomes. This can be due to missing pre-requisite knowledge such as the coherent mental integration of the pictorial and symbolic sources of information. In order to support learners in this process, we encouraged them to interactively and externally relate different static sources of information to each other before exploring dynamic and interactive visualisations. We evaluated the benefit of this instructional support in two experimental studies concerning the domains of statistics and mechanics. It revealed that the active integration of static representations before processing dynamic visualisations resulted in better performance and can provide a basis for a more systematic and goal-oriented experimentation behaviour during simulation-based discovery learning.in final form: 16 November 2004     

The paradigm shifts: Examining quality of teaching through assessment of student learning

Student learning is the strongest criterion for evaluating effective teaching. This article looks at three practices which partner students, teachers, and faculty peers in understanding the quality of teaching and learning through student course portfolios and teacher course portfolios, majors portfolios and teaching portfolios, and collaborative classroom assessment. Two outcomes of using a learning paradigm are building community and representing successes in higher education through documentation of effective teaching and learning.Barbara L. Cambridge, Professor of English and Associate Dean of the Faculties at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, serves on the IUPUI Program Review and Assessment Committee and recently chaired the Task Force on Accountability and Assessment for Indiana University's Strategic Directions Longrange Planning. She has made presentations and written on portfolio assessment, assessment and evaluation of faculty work, and issues in undergraduate education. Editor of theJournal of Teaching Writing, she is past President of the National Council of Writing Program Administrators.     

Group work does not necessarily equal collaborative learning: evidence from observations and self-reports

Situative and sociocognitive analyses were combined to examine engagement in high-level collaborative learning and its relationship with individuals’ cognitions. Video footage of 53 science university students’ (nine groups) collaborative learning interactions as they worked through a case-based project was analysed in combination with students’ appraisals and reflections on the activity. Sizeable group differences in amount of high-level discussion of learning content were revealed. Individual high-level contributions were positively correlated with overall unit performance. Motivation at task onset predicted amount but not depth of content-related group discussion. Interviews with participants suggested that groups’ divergent patterns of engagement with content could be related to different perceptions of the notion of collaborative learning. Results are discussed in terms of implications for collaborative learning research and educational practice.