Use of webquest design for inservice teacher professional development

This study investigated whether a teacher professional development module built around designing WebQuests could improve teachers’ technological and pedagogical skills. The technological skills examined included Web searching and Web evaluating skills. The pedagogical skills targeted were developing a working definition for higher-order thinking skills, and designing WebQuest tasks to improve such skills. This case study was carried out with six inservice teachers. After the training, all the teachers showed improvement in their Web searching and evaluating skills. Furthermore, teachers adopted a working definition for higher-order thinking skills, and, using Web resources, they designed activities that promote students’ higher-order thinking. This study provides evidence supporting the use of design-based activities in learning technological and pedagogical skills and suggests an effective inservice teacher professional development module.     

Video gaming as digital media,play, and family routine: implications for understanding video gaming and learning in family contexts

While a number of studies have investigated learning associated with video gaming in out-of-school settings, only recently have researchers begun to explore gaming and learning in the contexts of home and family life. This paper discusses three different frameworks within which we can situate video games and learning at home: (a) video gaming as digital media, (b) video gaming as play, and (c) video gaming as family routine. Each framework brings different issues related to learning into focus, and contributes new insights into the role gaming plays in the lives of children, adults, and families as a whole.     

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.     

Educational Technologists: Leading Change for a New Paradigm of Education

The transition from the industrial age to the information age has happened and is still happening in our society (Duffy, 2009). However, our current educational systems still operate based on the needs of the industrial-age society (Watson, Watson, & Reigeluth, n.d), making them among the least impacted organizations (Reigeluth & Joseph, 2002). This misalignment between schools and society takes the form of a discrepancy between what and how we teach students in schools and how schools are organized and operated (Banathy, 1991; Hargreaves, 1999; Wagner et al., 2006). Educational systems should address current students’ needs to facilitate their learning process and better preparethem for their future lives in society (Collins & Halverson, 2009). In this article, we explain how we envision the new paradigm of education and what roles educational technologists should play to help transform educational systems to this new paradigm.     

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...     

Challenges faced by pre-service chemistry teachers teaching in a laboratory and their solution proposals

This study examines the challenges faced by pre-service chemistry teachers teaching in a laboratory and their proposed solutions to these challenges. The study was conducted in a 13-week-long methodology course. Written statements from participants and observations from researchers were used as data sources. From these data, it was found that the participants faced challenges related to content knowledge and connections, laboratory and experiments, students, planning and implementing instruction and general teacher qualifications. In terms of solutions, various ideas were proposed, such as improved development of content knowledge, pre-lesson preparation and the acquisition of professional experience. The challenges expressed by participants differed from those observed by the researchers and increased during the length of the course. In addition, their proposed solutions were not sufficient, coherent or explicit.     

HELA: A novel hybrid ensemble learning algorithm for predicting academic performance of students

Education and Information Technologies - Education plays a major role in the development of the consciousness of the whole society. Education has been improved by analyzing educational data related...     

Teacher mediation of curriculum making: the role of reflexivity

This research explores curriculum making by teachers and offers a nuanced way of understanding these practices through the concept of reflexivity. The study draws from a collective case study of teachers in an online focus group, in order to identify and analyse diverse thinking on the curriculum making by teachers from Scotland and Wales. A WordPress® page was set up to generate both synchronous and asynchronous discussions over a period of five weeks to discuss curricular issues. Six teachers from Scotland and three teachers from Wales participated in the discussions. Data collection tools comprised iteratively designed interview questions and an Internal Conversation Indicator (ICONI), for indicating participants’ dominant mode of reflexivity. Data were analysed thematically, drawing from Margaret Archer’s theoretical constructs relating to reflexivity and internal conversation. Data analysis suggests that reflexivity provides a useful lens for understanding teachers’ particular approaches to curriculum making. The research suggests that curriculum making practices can be understood, at least partially, in relation to different modes of reflexivity. Further research is needed to substantiate these arguments and provide a richer picture of curriculum making.