Recurrent routines: Analyzing and supporting orchestration in technology-enhanced primary classrooms

The increasing presence of multiple Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in the classroom does not guarantee an improvement of the learning experiences of students, unless it is also accompanied by pedagogically effective orchestration of those technologies. In order to help teachers in this endeavour, it can be useful to understand how this orchestration takes place in real-world classrooms, and to provide teachers with professional development opportunities that can be easily applied to their everyday classroom practice. This paper describes a qualitative field study conducted in five primary school classrooms where a new collaborative software was introduced alongside existing classroom technology. For six months, teachers designed and orchestrated classroom activities in these authentic, technologically-rich settings. The analysis of the resulting activity designs and enactments uncovered a limited set of recurrent elements of teacher practice, or routines. These routines and their graphical representation are posited as a useful analysis tool for researchers in understanding complex teacher practices with ICT. Moreover, the authors propose that these routines offer new opportunities for professional development of teachers in effectively using ICT in their classrooms. Initial uses of these routines in teacher workshops, with encouraging results, are also presented.     

Learning in serious virtual worlds: Evaluation of learning effectiveness and appeal to students in the E-Junior project

The objective of this study is to present and to evaluate the E-Junior application: a serious virtual world (SVW) for teaching children natural science and ecology. E-Junior was designed according to pedagogical theories and curricular objectives to help children learn about the Mediterranean Sea and its environmental issues while playing. In this study, we present data about the E-Junior evaluation. A class in a serious virtual world (virtual group) was compared with a traditional type of class (traditional group) that contained identical learning objectives and contents but lacked a gaming aspect. Data collection consisted of quantitative and qualitative measures on a sample of 48 children. With regards to learning effectiveness, the results showed that the serious virtual world does not present statistically significant differences with the traditional type of class. However, students from the virtual group reported enjoying the class more, being more engaged, and having greater intentions to participate than students from the traditional group. The plausible explanation for this can be found in the qualitative data. The implications of these results and improvement proposals are also discussed in this work.     

Effects of teaching and learning styles on students’ reflection levels for ubiquitous learning

Ubiquitous learning (u-learning), in conjunction with supports from the digital world, is recognized as an effective approach for situating students in real-world learning environments. Earlier studies concerning u-learning have mainly focused on investigating the learning attitudes and learning achievements of students, while the causations such as learning style and teaching style were usually ignored. This study aims to investigate the effects of teaching styles and learning styles on reflection levels of students within the context of u-learning. In particular, we investigated the teaching styles at the dimensions of brainstorming and instruction and recall and the learning styles at the dimensions of active and reflective learning. The experiment was conducted with 39 fifth grader students at an elementary school in southern Taiwan. A u-learning environment was established at a butterfly ecology garden to conduct experiments for natural science courses. The experimental results of one-way ANCOVA show that those students who received a matching teaching–learning style presented a significant improvement in their reflection level. That is, matching the learning styles of students with the appropriate teaching styles can significantly improve students’ reflection levels in a u-learning environment.     

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.     

Key instructional design issues in a cellular phone-based mobile learning project

Adding flexibility to the learning process, mobile learning offers great opportunities for education, especially for teenagers, who show great attentiveness to mobile technologies. Thus, the need to focus on design aspects of such learning is growing. This study aims to reveal critical issues in designing mobile learning based on a program for 11th graders and to unfold students’ perceptions about reasons for participation, satisfaction, implementation processes, and specific content representation types. Reflections on insights gleaned from the instructional design process of the project and students’ perceptions are presented with related recommendations.     

Effects on participation of an experimental CSCL-programme to support elaboration: Do all students benefit?

Computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) is aimed at enhancing and supporting the active participation of all students in knowledge sharing and knowledge co-construction. In this study, an experimental programme was designed to support students in elaborating and justifying their positions in CSCL discussions. The effects of this experimental programme on the participation of students as compared to their counterparts in a control programme were determined. It was hypothesised that special attention to elaboration improves the degree and quality of student’s participation. The subjects in the study were 190 students from nine different primary school classes. The results both show a main effect on the degree of participation of students in the experimental programme and the expected effects of the programme in terms of better quality participation. Although the programme aimed at enhancing the degree and quality of the participation of all students, participation appeared to depend on certain learner characteristics. Students from minority backgrounds benefited less than majority students from the programme in terms of degree of participation. Boys benefited less than girls from the programme in terms of the quality of their participation.     

The effects of a wiki-based collaborative process writing pedagogy on writing ability and attitudes among upper primary school students in Mainland China

This study mainly explored the effects of a Wiki-based Collaborative Process Writing Pedagogy (WCPWP) on writing ability and writing attitudes among Primary Four students in Shenzhen, China. Besides, this study also investigated students' collaborative writing process with the WCPWP. Students wrote their compositions in a MediaWiki platform (www.joyouswriting.com) named Joyous Writing Club (JWC) developed by the first author. By using a quasi-experimental design, two groups (classes) of Primary Four students participated in this study. Both quantitative and qualitative data were collected including writing ability composition tests (pre-test and post-test), writing attitude tests (pre-test and post-test), online wiki documents, and observations. The results provided a general picture of the students' collaborative writing process and showed that the WCPWP had a positive but not significant effect on students' writing ability. Importantly, the results indicated that the WCPWP had a significant positive effect on the writing attitudes of students. The study further discussed the reasons related to the positive effects of the WCPWP on writing ability (not significant) and writing interests (significant). Implications and recommendations for primary school educators and Chinese language teachers are discussed.     

E-character education among digital natives: Focusing on character exemplars

This study focused on open online character education implemented in e-HO, a holistic learning environment embedded with a character exemplar video-on-demand (VOD) system. E-HO, designed to use the Internet to enhance holistic and character education's efficacies in a way that is fitting for and favored by digital natives, also aimed to counteract the negative impacts of the mass media. A comprehensive investigation of a survey conducted among 1013 university students for this e-character education program is presented with a detailed study on students' preferences referring to various demographic variables including grade level, gender, discipline and the number of exemplar exposure instances concerning the five scales extracted in this particular survey. In accordance with previous studies, this study suggested that grade level differences could be explained by cognitive ability. Gender differences and discipline differences both emerged because of differences in “people-things” orientation between genders and also between disciplines with distinct, long-term professional foci and practices. Compelling counterbalancing effects were witnessed between the developments of discipline differences and grade level differences, which were greatly enhanced by consistently implementing holistic education. A preliminary “cognitive threshold” of VOD exposure within a semester among the female participants appeared at 10 viewings, beyond which substantially more effective pedagogical efficacies emerged.     

How do young children engage with mobile apps? Cognitive,psychomotor, and affective perspective

This paper reports on situations in which children engage with mobile apps to better understand how they learn through such interaction. The following two research questions were postulated to address the research purpose: i) What are the conditions that engage children with mobile apps? ii) How does learning take place during children's engagement with mobile apps? The study was carried out using a qualitative approach by observing young children's interactions when using mobile apps. A total of 18 pre-schoolers aged 4–6 years participated in the study. The observation sessions were video-recorded to unobtrusively observe the participants' interactions with 20 selected mobile apps. The data were analysed using a thematic approach to examining children's emergent behaviours when engaging with mobile apps to identify, generate code, and produce themes. The findings demonstrated three prominent conditions of children's learning engagement: collective sensory skill, emotional expression, and verbal expression. It is evident from the study that learning in this environment takes place through cognitive, psychomotor-based, and affective means. This study provides significant insight on how young children engage with mobile apps to articulate their design implications as well as general guidelines for selecting quality mobile apps to encourage engagement in home, classroom, and library use.     

Integrating intuitive and novel grounded concepts in a dynamic geometry learning environment

The development of geometry knowledge requires integration of intuitive and novel concepts. While instruction may take many representational forms we argue that grounding novel information in perception and action systems in the context of challenging activities will promote deeper learning. To facilitate learning we introduce a grounded integration pattern of instruction, focusing on (1) eliciting intuitive concepts, (2) introducing novel grounding metaphors, and (3) embedding challenges to promote distinguishing between ideas. To investigate this pattern we compared elementary school children in two conditions who engaged in variations of a computer-based dynamic geometry learning environment that was intended to elicit intuitive concepts of shapes. In the grounded integration condition children performed a procedure of explicitly identifying defining features of shapes (e.g. right angles) with the assistance of animated depictions of spatially-meaningful gestures (e.g. hands forming right angles). In a numerical integration condition children identified defining features with the assistance of a numerical representation. Children in the grounded integration were more likely to accurately identify target shapes in a posttest identification task. We discuss the relevancy of the grounded integration pattern on the development of instructional tools.     

Requirements elicitation for virtual actors in collaborative learning environments

This paper reports on the elicitation of requirements for Virtual Actors in Collaborative Virtual Learning Environments (CVLEs). The methodological approach followed involves the phased development of a series of learning environments which are observed in use by parents, children and teachers. The focus of study is on the interactivity and social communication issues that arise in the learning situation. The research uses as its case study the work of the Manchester Museum Education Service with children at Key Stage Level 2 (9–11 years old) of the National Curriculum. The particular learning situation is based on senet, an ancient Egyptian board game from the Museum’s collection of artefacts from the pyramid builders’ town of Kahun. Results are presented of the first phase prototype, a single display groupware system where interactions take place face-to-face in the ‘real-world’ external to the environment. Results are also presented of the second phase prototype, a multi-user groupware environment in which the users are remotely located and interaction is mainly internal to the environment. The paper discusses how the results from these two phases are being used to establish requirements for a CVLE to be developed in the third phase of research.     

Using ubiquitous games in an English listening and speaking course: Impact on learning outcomes and motivation

This paper reports the results of a study which aimed to investigate how ubiquitous games influence English learning achievement and motivation through a context-aware ubiquitous learning environment. An English curriculum was conducted on a school campus by using a context-aware ubiquitous learning environment called the Handheld English Language Learning Organization (HELLO). HELLO helps students to engage in learning activities based on the ARCS motivation theory, involving various educational strategies, including ubiquitous game-based learning, collaborative learning, and context-aware learning. Two groups of students participated in the learning activities prescribed in a curriculum by separately using ubiquitous game-based learning and non-gaming learning. The curriculum, entitled ‘My Campus’, included three learning activities, namely ‘Campus Environment’, ‘Campus Life’ and ‘Campus Story’. Participants included high school teachers and juniors. During the experiment, tests, a survey, and interviews were conducted for the students. The evaluation results of the learning outcomes and learning motivation demonstrated that incorporating ubiquitous games into the English learning process could achieve a better learning outcomes and motivation than using non-gaming method. They further revealed a positive relationship between learning outcomes and motivation.     

Using Wiki in teacher education: Impact on knowledge management processes and student satisfaction

The current study reports on the use of Wiki as an online didactic tool to develop knowledge management (KM) processes in higher education. This study integrates social constructivist principles to learning where learners are pro-active and collaborative through higher order cognitive processes. The study was administered in two countries, namely Egypt and Italy, to close a gap in the literature with an aim to introduce KM processes in teacher educational programmes. These processes are seen as necessary for teachers’ professional skills. Such processes are claimed to enable teachers and therefore schools to evolve in a networked information-driven global society, especially as the complexity of subject knowledge is increasing. It is also a learning experience where teachers learn how to provide their students with educational settings where technology is enabled.     

Exploring relationships between students’ interaction and learning with a haptic virtual biomolecular model

This study explores tertiary students’ interaction with a haptic virtual model representing the specific binding of two biomolecules, a core concept in molecular life science education. Twenty students assigned to a haptics (experimental) or no-haptics (control) condition performed a “docking” task where users sought the most favourable position between a ligand and protein molecule, while students’ interactions with the model were logged. Improvement in students’ understanding of biomolecular binding was previously measured by comparing written responses to a target conceptual question before and after interaction with the model. A log-profiling tool visualized students’ movement of the ligand molecule during the docking task. Multivariate parallel coordinate analyses explored any relationships in the entire student data set. The haptics group produced a tighter constellation of collected final docked ligand positions in comparison with no-haptics students, coupled to docking profiles that depicted a more fine-tuned ligand traversal. Students in the no-haptics condition employed double the amount of interactive behaviours concerned with switching between different visual chemical representations offered by the model. In the no-haptics group, this visually intense processing was synonymous with erroneously ‘fitting’ the ligand closer distances to the protein surface. Students who showed higher learning gains tended to engage fewer visual representational switches, and were from the haptics group, while students with a higher spatial ability also engaged fewer visual representational switches, irrespective of assigned condition. From an information-processing standpoint, visual and haptic coordination may offload the visual pathway by placing less strain on visual working memory. From an embodied cognition perspective, visual and tactile sensorimotor interactions in the macroworld may provide access to constructing knowledge about submicroscopic phenomena. The results have cognitive and practical implications for the use of multimodal virtual reality technologies in educational contexts.     

Exploring the cognitive loads of high-school students as they learn concepts in web-based environments

This study measured high-school learners' cognitive load as they interacted with different web-based curriculum components, and examined the interactions between cognitive load and web-based concept learning. Participants in this study were 105 11th graders from an academic senior high school in Taiwan. An online, multimedia curriculum on the topic of global warming, which lasted for four weeks, provided the learning context. After students worked through the curriculum, their feelings about the degree of mental effort that it took to complete the learning tasks were measured by self-report on a 9-point Likert scale. An online test and the flow-map method were applied to assess participants' concept achievements. The results showed that curriculum components such as scientific articles, online notebooks, flash animations and the online test induced a relatively high cognitive load, and that a lower cognitive load resulted in better concept achievement. Also, students appeared to adopt different learning approaches that were corresponding to different levels of cognitive load.     

Exploring Newtonian mechanics in a conceptually-integrated digital game: Comparison of learning and affective outcomes for students in Taiwan and the United States

This study investigates the potential of a digital game that overlays popular game-play mechanics with formal physics representations and terminology to support explicit learning and exploration of Newtonian mechanics. The analysis compares test data, survey data, and observational data collected during implementations in Taiwan and the United States with students in grades 7–9. Results demonstrate learning on some core disciplinary measures and high levels of learner engagement, indicating the potential benefits of this genre of conceptually-integrated games, but also suggesting that further research and development will be needed to more fully harness this potential. Encouragingly, striking similarities were observed across the two countries in terms of learning and engagement, suggesting that this genre of learning games may prove suitable for engaging students in active exploration of core science concepts across multiple countries.     

Group differences in computer supported collaborative learning: Evidence from patterns of Taiwanese students’ online communication

This study explored the differences among online elementary school student groups based on their communication features. Two hundred and ninety-one Taiwanese students, ranging in age from 11 to 12 years old, participated in this study. The students were randomly arranged within-class into three-member groups. Each group was asked to use a collaborative learning system to accomplish a group task generating a shared concept map. The textual discussions in each group during collaboration were collected, coded, categorized, and quantified to profile their communication characteristics. Cluster analysis on the resulting communication characteristics resulted in four types of small student groups, including passive or reticent, frequently off-task, actively participating, and knowledge emphasizing. Most student groups (56%) were found to be relatively passive or reticent. Frequently off-task student groups made a protrusive amount of messages for off-task social purposes. The actively participating student groups were characterized by abundant discussion, particularly for continuing task, managing procedure and coordinating efforts. The distinctive feature of knowledge emphasizing student groups was that they devoted particular attention to task related knowledge. In addition, they performed better in task accomplishment.     

Digital dysfunctions in primary school: A pilot study

Learning often involves complex cognitive and motorical processes, and while most learners cope adequately with these challenges there are always some that struggle. When new kinds of knowledge are introduced there is a possibility that some learners will find this new knowledge hard to acquire, and thus manifest a dysfunction. Today the new knowledge can be found within the digital domain. Some learners need more time and more efforts to master the different aspects of digital literacy, some of these even need special attention from friends, teachers or others. Is it possible that this group of learners is experiencing some kind of dysfunctions? It is likely to think so, there are a variety of different learning dysfunctions related to many learning domains, and when a new domain is established it would not come as a surprise that a new form of dysfunction is discovered. This article seeks to answer the question: “Do digital dysfunctions exist?” The answer is given as indicators more than as solid proof. In this study a group of 144 pupils is reduced through a triangulation of qualitative and quantitative methods, and ends up with three cases where there are obvious lacks of digital literacy without any obvious reason. The study also deals with definitions on “digital literacy”, and tries to point out what construct the term “digital literacy” in the study material. This construct is then used for measuring digital literacy.