Using Math Journals to Enhance Second Graders’ Communication of Mathematical Thinking

As an action research project, using mixed methodology, this study investigated how the use of math journals affected second grade students’ communication of mathematical thinking. For this study, math journal instruction was provided. The data gathering included pre- and post- math assessment, students’ math journals, interviews with the students, and teacher’s reflective journal. Findings of the study indicated that the use of math journals positively influenced the students’ communication of mathematical thinking and the use of math vocabulary. Additionally, math journals served as a communication tool between the students and teacher and an assessment tool for the teacher. The implications of this study regarding students’ writing ability and time constraints issues were also discussed.     

Improved Student Reasoning About Carbon-Transforming Processes Through Inquiry-Based Learning Activities Derived from an Empirically Validated Learning Progression

This paper reports on our use of a fine-grained learning progression to assess secondary students’ reasoning through carbon-transforming processes (photosynthesis, respiration, biosynthesis). Based on previous studies, we developed a learning progression with four progress variables: explaining mass changes, explaining energy transformations, explaining subsystems, and explaining large-scale systems. For this study, we developed a 2-week teaching module integrating these progress variables. Students were assessed before and after instruction, with the learning progression framework driving data analysis. Our work revealed significant overall learning gains for all students, with the mean post-test person proficiency estimates higher by 0.6 logits than the pre-test proficiency estimates. Further, instructional effects were statistically similar across all grades included in the study (7th–12th) with students in the lowest third of initial proficiency evidencing the largest learning gains. Students showed significant gains in explaining the processes of photosynthesis and respiration and in explaining transformations of mass and energy, areas where prior research has shown that student misconceptions are prevalent. Student gains on items about large-scale systems were higher than with other variables (although absolute proficiency was still lower). Gains across each of the biological processes tested were similar, despite the different levels of emphasis each had in the teaching unit. Together, these results indicate that students can benefit from instruction addressing these processes more explicitly. This requires pedagogical design quite different from that usually practiced with students at this level.     

Effects of graphic organizers in online discussions: comparison between instructor-provided and student-generated

The current experimental study examined the effects of graphic organizers in a collaborative learning context where students constructed knowledge during online discussions. As the results could vary depending on how students interacted with the graphic organizers, this study compared two different approaches: instructor-provided versus student-generated graphic organizers. Thus, the purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of receiving or generating graphic organizers on students’ engagement in online discussions. Thirty-six graduate students enrolled in an online graduate course participated in the study. While analyzing an instructional design case, students were asked to discuss design issues in a randomly assigned group. There were three conditions: control condition without graphic organizers, instructor-provided, and student-generated graphic organizers. Major findings revealed that both generating and receiving graphic organizers facilitated students’ higher levels of cognitive engagement, and encouraged students to consider alternative views during the discussions. Without the graphic organizer, students tended to simply summarize previous messages or raise new issues rather than elaborating on previous topics. There was a significant finding regarding the ways of interacting graphic organizers. Students discussed more topics when they were given instructor’s graphic organizers rather than when they were asked to generate them.     

Attention-based long short-term memory network using sentiment lexicon embedding for aspect-level sentiment analysis in Korean

Although deep learning breakthroughs in NLP are based on learning distributed word representations by neural language models, these methods suffer from a classic drawback of unsupervised learning techniques. Furthermore, the performance of general-word embedding has been shown to be heavily task-dependent. To tackle this issue, recent researches have been proposed to learn the sentiment-enhanced word vectors for sentiment analysis. However, the common limitation of these approaches is that they require external sentiment lexicon sources and the construction and maintenance of these resources involve a set of complexing, time-consuming, and error-prone tasks. In this regard, this paper proposes a method of sentiment lexicon embedding that better represents sentiment word's semantic relationships than existing word embedding techniques without manually-annotated sentiment corpus. The major distinguishing factor of the proposed framework was that joint encoding morphemes and their POS tags, and training only important lexical morphemes in the embedding space. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, we conducted experiments comparing with two baseline models. As a result, the revised embedding approach mitigated the problem of conventional context-based word embedding method and, in turn, improved the performance of sentiment classification.     

Mobile learning for early reading in Cambodia

Education and Information Technologies - This paper reports on a mixed-methods study of the Total Reading Approach for Children Plus (TRAC+) program, with a particular focus on its mobile learning...     

Learning analytics application to examine validity and generalizability of game-based assessment for spatial reasoning

Game-based assessment (GBA), a specific application of games for learning, has been recognized as an alternative form of assessment. While there is a substantive body of literature that supports the educational benefits of GBA, limited work investigates the validity and generalizability of such systems. In this paper, we describe applications of learning analytics methods to provide evidence for psychometric qualities of a digital GBA called Shadowspect, particularly to what extent Shadowspect is a robust assessment tool for middle school students' spatial reasoning skills. Our findings indicate that Shadowspect is a valid assessment for spatial reasoning skills, and it has comparable precision for both male and female students. In addition, students' enjoyment of the game is positively related to their overall competency as measured by the game regardless of the level of their existing spatial reasoning skills.

Practitioner notes

What is already known about this topic:

• Digital games can be a powerful context to support and assess student learning.
• Games as assessments need to meet certain psychometric qualities such as validity and generalizability.
• Learning analytics provide useful ways to establish assessment models for educational games, as well as to investigate their psychometric qualities.

What this paper adds:

• How a digital game can be coupled with learning analytics practices to assess spatial reasoning skills.
• How to evaluate psychometric qualities of game-based assessment using learning analytics techniques.
• Investigation of validity and generalizability of game-based assessment for spatial reasoning skills and the interplay of the game-based assessment with enjoyment.

Implications for practice and/or policy:

• Game-based assessments that incorporate learning analytics can be used as an alternative to pencil-and-paper tests to measure cognitive skills such as spatial reasoning.
• More training and assessment of spatial reasoning embedded in games can motivate students who might not be on the STEM tracks, thus broadening participation in STEM.
• Game-based learning and assessment researchers should consider possible factors that affect how certain populations of students enjoy educational games, so it does not further marginalize specific student populations.

     

Oral discourse skills: Dimensionality of comprehension and retell of narrative and expository texts,and the relations of language and cognitive skills to identified dimensions

We examined the dimensionality of oral discourse skills (comprehension and retell of texts) and the relations of language and cognitive skills to the identified dimensions. Data were from 529 English-speaking second graders (M_age = 7.42; 46% female; 52.6% Whites, 33.8% African Americans, 4.9% Hispanics, 4.7% two or more races, .8% Asian Americans, .6% American Indians, .2% Native Hawaiians, 2.5% unknown; data from 2014–2015 to 2016–2017). Confirmatory factor analysis revealed that oral discourse skills are best described as four related but dissociable dimensions of narrative comprehension, narrative retell, expository comprehension, and expository retell (rs = .59–.84). Language and cognitive skills had different patterns of relations to the identified dimensions and explained larger amounts of variance in comprehension than in retell.