A Comparison of Different Conceptual Change Pedagogies Employed Within the Topic of “Sound Propagation”

The purpose of this study was to compare different conceptual change methods within a topic on ‘sound propagation’. The study was conducted with 80 grade 5 students (aged 11–12 year old) drawn from four cohort classes in an elementary school on the north coast of Black Sea Region in Turkey. While one class was assigned as a control group, the others formed experimental groups (one with a conceptual change text, one with analogies presented as computer animations and one with a combination of conceptual change text, analogies and computer animations). A questionnaire with 10 two-tier questions was administered as a pretest a week before the teaching intervention, and the same test was re-administered immediately after the intervention as a post-test. The questionnaire was also employed as a delayed post-test 3 weeks after the teaching intervention. The experimental groups performed significantly better in the post-test that the control group (p < 0.05). Within the experimental groups, the group exposed to a combination of the conceptual change text, analogies and computer animations performed best on the post-test and the delayed post-test (p < 0.05). Overall the study indicated that the intervention that employed the entire suite of conceptual change pedagogies produced the best learning outcomes.     

Effect of emotion-aware interventions on students’ behavioral and emotional states

The goal of this research is to investigate the effect of emotion-aware interventions on students’ behavioral and emotional states. To this end, we collected data from 12 students in the 9th grade in a high school in Turkey. The data collection took place in two sessions of an English Course. While the students were reading articles and solving relevant questions, our data collection application running in the background recorded the videos of the individual students through a camera and captured students’ screens in a non-intrusive manner. In total, we had 12.5 h of student data. We employed the human expert labeling process (HELP) (Aslan et al. in Workshop proceedings at international conference on intelligent tutoring systems (ITS), pp 156–165, 2016) to have the data labeled (150 h of data labeling in total). The data collection application was designed in a way that it also collected emotional self-labels (i.e., emotional states as self-reported by students at any time of learning). We leveraged emotional self-label information to suggest various real-time interventions for the students. The results obtained using the final expert labels showed that the percentage of the students’ Satisfied state was significantly higher after interventions. The results also demonstrated that although the interventions were triggered by the emotional states as self-labeled by the students and tailored to improve such states, there was a major positive impact of these interventions on students’ behavioral states. This preliminary study showed that even with a limited set of emotion-aware interventions based on self-labels, students’ states could be impacted positively. Conducting large-scale pilots leveraging more advanced interventions is a future direction for our research.     

Exploring Kid Space in the wild: a preliminary study of multimodal and immersive collaborative play-based learning experiences

Educational technology research and development - Parents recognize the potential benefits of technology for their young children but are wary of too much screen time and its potential deficits in...     

Emotional outcomes of e-learning adoption during compulsory online education

Education and Information Technologies - Information on the emotional outcomes of e-learning system use and emotional aspects of user experience in higher education is quite limited. Accordingly,...     

Collaboration between a child telephone helpline and sexual and reproductive health and rights organisations in Senegal: lessons learned

This study identifies lessons learned from a collaboration between a child telephone helpline and sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) organisations in Senegal established in the context of an SRHR programme for young people. We assessed how helpline operators are equipped to address sexual health and rights issues with young people, what the relevant skills of operators are, and to what extent referral to sexual and reproductive health (SRH) service providers took place. A documentary review, a vignette study and interviews with six key informants and all seven operators took place. The collaboration led to promising initiatives, such as the provision of SRH training, the exchange of staff, referral to SRH service providers. However, the counselling advice provided by operators was not always in line with the rights-based approach and responses were influenced by underlying norms concerning young people’s sexuality. Additionally, concerns about confidentiality were noted. The collaboration was an innovative attempt to respond to young people’s limited access to SRHR information and services but there is a need for more in-depth training of helpline operator’s skills and the development of a standardised rights-based counselling manual.