Scaffolding strategies for supporting middle school students’ online inquiry processes

Online inquiry, use of the Web as an information resource to inquire into science, has become increasingly common in middle schools in recent years. However, prior research has found that middle school students tend to use the Web in a superficial manner. To address the challenges that students face in online inquiry, we designed the Digital IdeaKeeper, a scaffolded software tool to help students engage in online inquiry through support for inquiry planning, information search, analysis, and synthesis. This study examined the differences between regular and IdeaKeeper-supported online inquiry performed by 8 pairs of sixth graders in naturalistic classroom settings. Analysis of 80 screen videos of students’ computer activities and conversations found that IdeaKeeper-supported online inquiry was more integrated, efficient, continuous, metacognitive, and focused. This study has important implications for designing online learning environments for middle school students.     

Students’ participation intention in an online discussion forum: Why is computer-mediated interaction attractive?

Anecdotal evidence indicates that an online discussion forum may not be utilized to its full potential in enhancing the effectiveness and efficiency of teaching due to a lower than expected student participation rate. This paper seeks to identify the motivational behavioral factors influencing students’ intention to participate in an online discussion forums (ODF). Drawing on the literature on social psychology and applying the theory of reasoned action, we develop a conceptual model of intention to participate in an online discussion forum and empirically test the hypotheses in a cross-sectional quantitative survey. The findings indicate that expectancy on hedonic outcome and utilitarian outcome and peer pressure positively influence the participation intention of students. Also, the perceived importance of learning positively moderates the relationship between utilitarian outcome expectancy and participation intention. Theoretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed.     

Tracing elementary school students’ study tactic use in gStudy by examining a strategic and self-regulated learning

This study investigated, with the help of log file traces (f = 172), how 20 elementary school students used study tactics when studying science within the gStudy learning environment and examined how tactic use contributed to the students’ achievement. The analysis of this study is divided into two parts. First, at the situational level, the focus is on capturing the tactics that were used in different gStudy sessions, classifying the gStudy sessions based on the tactic use, and illustrating the patterned use of tactics during these sessions. Second, at the individual level, the focus is on examining individual students’ typical methods of using tactics, which helps to illustrate how tactic use contributes to the students’ achievement. The gStudy sessions were classified into three categories on the basis of tactic use: rare, moderate, and frequent. Findings indicate that frequent tactic use did not contribute to deep learning. Moderate tactic use was fairly effective for learning, but rare tactic use contributed to deep learning. The results did not show that the use of many study tactics improves learning; rather, they suggest that the distinguishing feature in strategic learning is not the tactic use itself but the way the tactic is performed.     

Computer games development and appreciative learning approach in enhancing students’ creative perception

Creativity is an important entity in developing human capital while computer games are the current generation’s contemporary tool. This study focused on the teaching of computer games development in order to enhance the creative perception of secondary school children. The study applied randomised subjects, with control group experimental design, which involved 69 Malaysian form one students, aged 13–14 year-old. Different pedagogical strategies were being investigated on the abilities to enhance students’ creative perception. Treatment group adopted appreciative learning approach, which was based on Appreciative Inquiry (AI) theory. Meanwhile, control group adopted self-paced learning, followed by do-it-yourself session. Previous studies indicated that although appreciative learning approach is still in its infancy development, the approach is gaining its momentum in educational settings as it focuses on strengthening a person’s capacities and potential. Students’ creative perception was assessed using Khatena-Torrance Creative Perception Inventory (KTCPI). It was found students in treatment group gained a mean score of 71.82, which was significantly higher at .05 level of significance compared to the mean score of 50.49 exhibited by the control group. Yet, both treatment and control groups showed significant increases in pre-to-post-test scores. Dimensions within KTCPI were further analysed in order to present a better picture of students’ creative perception. As a conclusion, different pedagogical strategy generated different level of creative perception enhancement.     

Discussing teaching videocases online: Perspectives of preservice and inservice EFL teachers in Taiwan

This study investigated the application of an online videocase discussion community into fostering preservice and inservice EFL (English as a foreign language) teachers’ professional development in Taiwan. This investigation further revealed the nature and development of discussion discourse and the participating teachers’ perceptions of this online learning experience. Also included were potential concerns or difficulties encountered by these community members. There were 21 preservice teachers, 7 secondary school teachers, and 4 university teachers involved in this study. Multiple data collection methods included teaching videos, online discussion messages, interviews, reflection journals, and an open-ended questionnaire. The findings showed that the preservice and inservice teachers appeared to respectively play different roles in discussing teaching videocases online. Yet, what they noticed in the teaching events shifted from diverse to similar focuses after engaging in online videocase discussion for almost one year. These teachers further perceived professional learning opportunities in this community, albeit several issues might hinder some of them from joining the discussion frequently. Pedagogical implications and research suggestions are offered for teacher educators and researchers to further codify and document teacher professional development in various online videocase discussion contexts.     

The importance of personality in students’ perceptions of the online learning experience

The current research examined the relationship between the Big Five personality dimensions and five specific types of online course impressions (engagement, value to career, overall evaluation, anxiety/frustration, and preference for online courses). Results revealed that conscientiousness was the most consistent predictor of an individual’s impressions of online courses. Specifically, conscientiousness was significantly related with each of the five online course impressions studied. In addition, agreeableness and openness were both positively related with the perceived value of online courses to one’s career. Work experience was positively associated with engagement, value to career, and overall evaluation, and negatively associated with anxiety/frustration. Undergraduates reported stronger preferences for online courses than did graduate students, and married students reported lower levels of anxiety/frustration with online courses. Results are interpreted with the intent of providing an enhanced understanding of the importance of personality in students’ impressions of the online learning experience.     

An online game approach for improving students’ learning performance in web-based problem-solving activities

In this paper, an online game was developed in the form of a competitive board game for conducting web-based problem-solving activities. The participants of the game determined their move by throwing a dice. Each location of the game board corresponds to a gaming task, which could be a web-based information-searching question or a mini-game; the former was used to guide the participants to search for information to answer a series of questions related to the target learning issue, while the latter was used to provide supplementary materials during the gaming process. To evaluate the performance of the proposed approach, an experiment was conducted on an elementary school natural science course. The experimental results showed that the proposed approach not only significantly promoted the flow experience, learning attitudes, learning interest and technology acceptance degree of the students, but also improved their learning achievements in the web-based problem-solving activity.     

The effect of moderator’s facilitative strategies on online synchronous discussions

Moderators play an important role within a computer supported collaborative learning environment, and thus facilitative strategies and communication technology are nowadays used to enhance students’ learning. This study proposed facilitative strategies as a guide for students’ learning, and explored the influence of these strategies on the students’ online synchronous discussion. A total of 331 senior high school students from eight computer classes in northern Taiwan were recruited to participate in this study. They were randomly assigned into an experimental condition, with the moderators’ facilitation to complete online learning tasks, and the control condition without moderators’ support. To fulfill the goal of the research, four strategies—helping students focus on the main topic, facilitating students’ making argumentation, giving students positive feedback, and helping students sustain threaded discussion—were adopted to facilitate the online synchronous discussion in the experimental condition. According to the results of the content analysis, four group discussion patterns were revealed, including collaboration, centralization, partial contribution, and non-interaction. The findings suggest that the moderator helped enhance the collaboration pattern and increase the online participation rate. In addition, it was found that the strategies of helping students focus on the main topic and giving students positive feedback were frequently employed.     

A visualisation tool to aid exploration of students’ interactions in asynchronous online communication

Much research in recent years has focused on the introduction of virtual learning environments (VLEs) to universities, documenting practice, and sharing experience ( [Armitage et?al., 2001], [Browne and Jenkins, 2003], [Moron-Garcia, 2004] and [Weller, 2007]). Attention has been directed towards the importance of online dialogue for learning as a defining feature of the VLE.Communicative tools are an important means by which VLEs have the potential to transform learning with computers from being passive and transmissive in nature, to being active and constructivist (Pavey & Garland, 2004). However, practical methods of reviewing and analysing online communication to trace cycles of real dialogue (and learning) have proved somewhat elusive. Qualitative methods are also under-used for VLE discussions, since they demand new sets of research skills for those unfamiliar with them, and can be time intensive.This paper describes a visualisation tool to aid the analysis of online communication. The tool has two purposes: first, it can be used on a day-to-day basis by teachers or forum moderators to review the development of a discussion and to support appropriate interventions. Second, the tool can support research activities since the visualisations generated provide the basis for further qualitative and quantitative analysis of online dialogue.The visualisation software is designed to encode interaction types simply and quickly. The software was tested and then used to analyse data from a sample of forums within the Moodle VLE. The paper discusses both the method of visualisation and analysis of the online interactions as a pilot for further research analysing interaction in discussion forums.     

The effects of feedback protocol on self-regulated learning in a web-based worked example learning environment

The current research investigated the effects of differing feedback protocols in a Web-based worked example learning environment to determine if changes would occur over time in goal orientation, self-regulation, self-efficacy or achievement. Participants from an undergraduate chemistry course were assigned to either a norm-referenced or self-referenced feedback group to receive feedback in relation to their performance on a weekly quiz administered via the Web. Results revealed that participants did not significantly change their goal orientation type or magnitude as a result of the differing feedback protocols, even with the addition of learning environment perception as a potential mediating variable. However, participants made significant decreases along the mastery approach and performance approach goal orientation sub-scales, regardless of the type of feedback received. While this was not anticipated, the results are consistent with other recent research within this context. An unanticipated trend also emerged, as those from the norm-referenced feedback group with a class-task perception of the learning environment were less likely to use worked examples but also demonstrated the greatest gains in self-efficacy. These were unanticipated outcomes and contrary to prior research. Recommendations for future research within this context such as authenticating participants’ perceptions of their assigned treatment condition, introducing additional feedback protocols such as a combined, choice, or control condition and building in a better gauge to track the time and context of changes within the constructs of interest are also discussed.     

Cognitive presence in asynchronous online learning: a comparison of four discussion strategies

Some scholars argue that students do not achieve higher level learning, or cognitive presence, in online courses. Online discussion has been proposed to bridge this gap between online and face‐to‐face learning environments. However, the literature indicates that the conventional approach to online discussion – asking probing questions – does not necessarily advance the discussion through the phases of cognitive presence: triggering events, exploration, integration and resolution, which are crucial for deep knowledge construction. Using mixed methods, we examined the contribution of four scenario‐based online discussion strategies – structured, scaffolded, debate and role play – to the learners' cognitive presence, the outcome of the discussion. Learners' discussion postings within each strategy were segmented and categorized according to the four phases. The discussion strategies, each using the same authentic scenario, were then compared in terms of the number of segments representing these phases. We found that the structured strategy, while highly associated with triggering events, produced no discussion pertaining to the resolution phase. The scaffolded strategy, on the other hand, showed a strong association with the resolution phase. The debate and role‐play strategies were highly associated with exploration and integration phases. We concluded that discussion strategies requiring learners to take a perspective in an authentic scenario facilitate cognitive presence, and thus critical thinking and higher levels of learning. We suggest a heuristic for sequencing a series of discussion forums and recommend areas for further related research.     

Assessing tenth-grade students’ problem solving ability online in the area of Earth sciences

This study examined tenth-grade students’ (n = 263) problem solving ability (PSA) online through assessing students’ domain-specific knowledge (DSK) and reasoning skills (RS) in Earth sciences as well as their attitudes toward (AT) Earth sciences related topics in a secondary school of Taiwan. The students’ PSA was evaluated based on a previous model (Chang, C. Y. (2004, November 26–27). Trends in assessing student earth science problem solving ability: the importance of domain-specific knowledge and reasoning skills in earth sciences. Paper presented at the Seoul Conference for International Earth Science Olympiad (IESO), Seoul, Korea; Chang, C. Y., & Barufaldi, J. P. (submitted). Does problem solving = prior knowledge + reasoning skills in science? An exploratory study. Journal of Experimental Education; Chang, C. Y., & Weng, Y. H. (2002). An exploratory study on students’ problem-solving ability in earth science. International Journal of Science Education, 24(5), 441–452) which empirically established that students’ PSA is a composite of DSK, RS and AT subscales. Major findings are as follows: (a) The correlation coefficient among students’ DSK, RS and AT was relatively small, indicating that these subscales might have successfully represented different constructs of students’ PSA; (b) a significantly positive correlation existed between students’ PSA total scores and each subscale. It is, therefore, suggested that students’ PSA may be potentially assessed online by measuring their essential components in the area of Earth sciences.     

Finnish high school students’ readiness to adopt online learning: Questioning the assumptions

The Finnish high school system in rural areas is facing challenges because of a decreasing number of the students. This situation places new emphasis on online learning. Online learning offers new possibilities for high schools to provide equal learning opportunities for their students. This paper explores students’ readiness to adapt their studying habits in the networked high schools by outlining their beliefs about online learning. Beliefs are assumed to direct people’s actions, in this case activities concerning studying online. Three hundred second year high school students from Eastern Finland who had not had the experiences of learning online were studied. The findings suggest that students polarize into negative, neutral and positive groups based on their beliefs concerning online learning. Results also indicate that students’ knowledge about the possibilities of online learning is quite superficial. In contrast to theories about collaborative learning practices, students see online learning rather differently. Students with negative and neutral beliefs especially see online learning merely as a static “warehouse” of materials and study-alone learning tasks instead of offering possibilities for collaborative knowledge building.     

Effects of an online team project-based learning environment with group awareness and peer evaluation on socially shared regulation of learning and self-regulated learning

Recently, some studies proposed methods to promote socially shared regulation of learning (SSRL) level within a team because high SSRL levels enable an effective collaboration. Meanwhile, several studies also proposed methods in online collaboration to enhance individual self-regulated learning (SRL). Notably, most existing studies focused on proposing methods and tools either for enhancing SSRL level within a team or for enhancing individual SRL. A computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) environment with proper supports is promising for simultaneously enhancing the SSRL level within a team and individual SRL because SSRL and SRL have an inseparable relation and mutually influence during collaborative process. Based on the existing principles and theories, this work adopts the supports of group awareness and peer evaluation in CSCL with project-based learning. Group awareness (GA) can reveal collaborative behaviour of group members and regulate their participation while peer assessment (PE), which can appraise member’s contribution, can encourage individual responsibility and refine regulatory strategies. This study finds that the proposed group awareness and peer assessment (GAPE) (i.e. the experimental class) moderately reduces the free-rider effect and enhanced SSRL level and individual SRL, compared with NO-GAPE (i.e. the control group). Furthermore, this study also confirms that the perceived SSRL level can effectively predict individual SRL.     

The impact of computer use at home on students’ Internet skills

This article reports on a study into the impact of students’ use of the Internet and the computer at home on digital skills they need for school. The study was conducted in the lower grades of Dutch secondary education (students aged 13–15). More than 2500 students, distributed over 116 classes in 68 schools, participated in the study. Internet and computer skills were measured by means of an objective test. Multilevel analysis was used to examine the impact of home access and use on Internet and computer skills taking into account the effect of students’ backgrounds. Students in pre-university education, third-graders and non-minority students appeared to have better Internet skills and a more advantageous home computer use than students in pre-vocational education, first-graders and minority students, respectively. The Internet skills of girls were hardly less developed than those of boys. Home access to e-mail and the extent to which students use the home computer for surfing, e-mailing, chatting and text processing were found to be substantially related to Internet and computer skills (taking into account the effect of several background characteristics of the students).     

Student interactions in online discussion forums: their perception on learning with business simulation games

Digital technology offers new teaching methods with controversial results over learning. They allow students to develop a more active participation in their learning process although it does not always drive to unequivocal better learning outcomes. This study aims to offer additional evidence on the contribution of business simulation games to students’ learning outcomes, considering student interactions in online discussion forums. We conducted a qualitative research with the online discussion forums of 5 different courses at bachelor and master levels, which involves 41 students’ teams. The final sample was composed of 3681 messages posted by the students. The results reveal that some generic and specific managerial skills exert a positive influence on learning outcomes. Students mostly highlighted teamwork, decision-making, information processing, reaching agreements, and dealing with uncertainty as the most relevant contributions of the game towards their learning. These results have instructional and pedagogical implications for determining the best way to enhance students’ motivation and learning outcomes when using digital technology methods, which involves recommendations that affect their design and monitoring.     

The role of academic emotions in the relationship between perceived academic control and self-regulated learning in online learning

Self-regulated learning is recognized as a critical factor for successful online learning, and students' perceived academic control and academic emotions are important antecedents of self-regulated learning. Because emotions and cognition are interrelated, investigating the joint relationship between perceived academic control and academic emotions on self-regulated learning would be valuable to understanding the process of self-regulated learning. Therefore, this study examined the role of academic emotions (enjoyment, anxiety, and boredom) in the relationship between perceived academic control and self-regulated learning in online learning. The path model was proposed to test the mediating and moderating effects of academic emotions. Data were collected from 426 Korean college students registered in online courses, and a path analysis was conducted. The results demonstrated that enjoyment mediated the relationship between perceived academic control and self-regulated learning, but the moderating effect of enjoyment was not significant. Boredom and anxiety did not have significant mediating effects on self-regulated learning, whereas they showed significant moderating effects in the relationship between perceived academic control and self-regulated learning. The role of academic emotions in learning and their implications for facilitating students' self-regulated learning in online learning were discussed based on the findings.     

Applying the Practical Inquiry Model to investigate the quality of students’ online discourse in an information ethics course based on Bloom’s teaching goal and Bird’s 3C model

The goal of this study is to better understand how the study participants’ cognitive discourse is displayed in their learning transaction in an asynchronous, text-based conferencing environment based on Garrison’s Practical Inquiry Model (2001). The authors designed an online information ethics course based on Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives and Bird’s 3C model (Content–Construction–Consolidation). The content analyzed included the participants’ message posts, the quality of the dialogue and the scaffolding strategies for mentoring used by group leaders and teachers.