Enhancing language learning through creation: the effect of digital storytelling on student learning motivation and performance in a school English course

This study explored how a free-space digital storytelling approach that advocates autonomy and creativity can be implemented in a formal elementary classroom and how it impacts students’ language learning motivation and performances. Participants of the study were 64 sixth grade students in Taiwan. Following an experimental design, the data collected from three data sources, including motivation surveys, achievement test scores, and digital stories, were analyzed and triangulated. Two performance indicators of the digital storytelling, levels of language usage and levels of creativity, were found to have significant but different impacts on language learning. While the students’ language usage performance in digital storytelling was significantly related to their achievement test scores, their creativity performance were significantly related to multiple motivation components, including extrinsic motivation, task value and elaboration. It was also found that the proposed digital storytelling approach had a positive impact on students’ language performance and contributed to an increase to students’ motivation in two dimensions: extrinsic goal orientation and elaboration, rather than intrinsic goal orientation. The results suggest that the positive impact of the proposed storytelling pedagogy resides in allowing students to stretch their creativity while demonstrating their language productivity, with the leverage of a holistic assessment scheme.     

The learning analytics of model-based learning facilitated by a problem-solving simulation game

This study investigated students’ modeling progress and strategies in a problem-solving simulation game through content analysis, and through supervised and unsupervised lag sequential analysis (LSA). Multiple data sources, including self-report models and activity logs, were collected from 25 senior high school students. The results of the content analysis found that the problem-solving simulation game helped most of the students to reflectively play with the science problem and build a workable model to solve it. By using the supervised LSA, it was found that the students who successful solved the game frequently linked the game contexts with the physics terminologies, while those who did not solve the problem simply relied on the intuitive knowledge provided in the reference materials. Furthermore, the unsupervised LSA identified four activity patterns that were not noticed in the supervised LSA: the fragmented, reference material centered, reference material aided modeling, and modeling centered patterns. Each pattern has certain associations with certain problem-solving outcomes. The results of this study also shed light on the use of different analytics techniques. While the supervised LSA is particularly helpful for depicting a contrast of activity patterns between two specific student groups, the unsupervised LSA is able to identify hidden significant patterns which were not clearly distinguished in the pre-defined student groups. Researchers may find these analytics techniques useful for analyzing students’ learning processes.     

Improving mathematics teaching and learning experiences for hard of hearing students with wireless technology-enhanced classrooms

Hard of hearing students usually face more difficulties at school than other students. A classroom environment with wireless technology was implemented to explore whether wireless technology could enhance mathematics learning and teaching activities for a hearing teacher and her 7 hard of hearing students in a Taiwan junior high school. Experiments showed that the highly interactive communication through the wireless network increased student participation in learning activities. Students demonstrated more responses to the teacher and fewer distraction behaviors. Fewer mistakes were made in in-class course work because Tablet PCs provided students scaffolds. Students stated that the environment with wireless technology was desirable and said that they hoped to continue using the environment to learn mathematics.     

Investigating the Links Between Students’ Learning Engagement and Modeling Competence in Computer-Supported Modeling-Based Activities

Journal of Science Education and Technology - The purpose of this study was to understand how students engage in computer-supported modeling-based activities (CSMBAs), and the relationship between...     

Prompting conceptual understanding with computer-mediated peer discourse and knowledge acquisition techniques

Numerous computer‐mediated communication (CMC) tools have been designed to facilitate group discourses on the Web. However, previous studies noted that participants did not value online conferencing as a method for conducting in‐depth discussions, and instead considered this method as merely scratching the surface of the issues involved. Therefore, the teachers must moderate the online discourse to add value to the success of CMC. This study presents a methodology that uses knowledge acquisition techniques during online discourses to increase student conceptual understanding and evaluation skills. The methodology explains the conceptual frameworks of individuals and the conceptual relationships between student peers. Active database triggers then are applied to automatically monitor the conceptual relationships and to moderate online discourses between student peers. Student reactions demonstrated that discourses mediated by the repertory grid analysis technique helped group members not only promote common conceptual understandings but also to approach the level of conceptual understanding of the teacher.     

A longitudinal analysis of student participation in a digital collaborative storytelling activity

Despite the positive potential of the online social networking platforms, the longitudinal studies regarding how children participate in digital storytelling communities is still scant in the literature. This study investigated how 26 elementary students participated in a 2-year digital storytelling community mediated by a social network application. By analyzing the students’ weekly responses, social networks, and their language learning performance, the results suggested that their oral reading proficiency improved along with their participation in the long-term activity. It was also found that the community features impacted the students’ sense of engagement in the activity. The feature of the learning community that allows students to team up with partners to complete a story improved their engagement and motivation. The social network analysis found that multiple literacies including multimedia processing, language, and collaboration were all considered by students as important criteria for the partnership to complete the collaborative digital storytelling work. However, such a prolonged collaborative digital storytelling activity also introduced new challenges for those students demonstrating unfavorable collaboration profiles as they needed to learn how to collaborate in order to team up with others. The implications of the findings for educational practice are discussed.

     

Augmenting the effect of virtual labs with "teacher demonstration" and "student critique" instructional designs to scaffold the development of scientific literacy

Instructional Science - Virtual labs provide space for students to iteratively test, observe, and revise their understanding so as to improve their scientific literacy. However, one of the...