Instructional Science

Participation in citizen science enables students to gain authentic research experience through collaboration with expert scientists. The purpose of this exploratory study was to investigate how the interactions between expert scientists and student citizen scientists were mediated through the collaborative investigation and co-creation of knowledge artifacts within a computer supported collaborative learning environment. Approximately 38 elementary students participated in a public citizen science project at the end of a school year. Their data (posts, comments, and photos) were downloaded for a post-hoc analysis. A mixed methods design, which merged quantitative SNA analyses and contextualized qualitative descriptions, provided an understanding of the interactions on the site. This analysis found that discussions related to knowledge artifacts that were novel or unexpected engaged a higher number of participants, but that the quality of scientific discussion was not related to the level of engagement. Expert scientists fulfilled a crucial role in generating scientific discussions about the artifacts. Students appeared to play moderating roles by asking questions and making assertions. However, they also were sometimes sidetracked by non-scientific interactions. The use of citizen science projects shows promise in engaging students in authentic research and providing a platform for expert scientists to demonstrate science practices for students. Recommendations for future research are offered to further enhance scientific discussions between all participants.

This study investigates how vocational education and training prepares students for future professions characterized by technological advancements and demands for sustainability and innovation. Specifically, it examines simulator-based learning in the Natural Resource Program at three upper secondary schools in Sweden. Using a sociomaterial perspective, the study aims to investigate the strategies used by the participants (both students and teachers) in a simulated activity to make sense of the task at hand when dealing with different kinds of situations and activities therein, and in what ways these may be conducive to the development of vocational knowledge. An ethnographic approach is used, employing various methodological tools to create rich datasets, including observations, video recordings, and fieldnotes. The focus is on teachers’ feedback, students’ questions, and task handling during simulation-based training. The analysis explores the relationships between these environments and how feedback and assessment practices affect students’ task performance. When dealing with simulation-based learning in the context of this study, the instructional processes seem to involve, rather than handling specific high-stakes and risky situations, the design of activities that aim at volume training. These activities are entangled with the training sessions included in the simulators but also with other practices and environments. We argue that the instructional work of the vocational teacher deals with making sense of how such entanglements work and are conducive to learning on the one hand, but also to making choices that imply unravelling such entanglements and keeping the worlds apart to put them back together again.

In the literature, there is a general assumption that teachers teach more effectively during team teaching compared with solo teaching. Although effective teaching behaviour is imperative for students’ academic outcomes, only scarce research exists on this difference. Therefore, it remains mainly unknown whether teachers teach more effectively during team teaching compared with solo teaching. This study aims to address this gap by providing a general picture of the differences in teachers’ self-reported effective teaching behaviour during solo teaching and team teaching. To achieve this, a large-scale cross-sectional survey study was performed among teachers (n = 453) in compulsory education. The SET questionnaire was administered to teachers who team teach. Overall, results show that teachers reported to be more capable of displaying effective teaching behaviour during team teaching compared with solo teaching. Furthermore, results show a positive relationship between teachers’ self-reported effective teaching behaviour and education type, teaching experience, and with team teaching percentage.

Enhancing students’ conceptual understanding and improving their inquiry skills and motivation for learning science are the goals of science instruction in learning environments. The current study investigated how different inquiry-based learning environments (regular classroom and computer-based environments) affect middle school students’ conceptual understanding of force and energy, inquiry skills, and motivation for learning science. A quasi-experimental pretest-posttest research design was used, with a total of 306 seventh-grade participants. A conceptual understanding test, an inquiry skills test, a motivation scale, and interviews were used to gather data. The findings revealed that the students in the computer-based learning environments showed significantly greater improvement than their counterparts in regular classroom environments in terms of conceptual understanding and inquiry skills. However, there was no meaningful difference in their motivation for learning science. Furthermore, the number of misconceptions about the topic of force and energy held by the students who learned in computer-based learning environments was relatively high. Possible reasons for the results including the advantages of instructional technologies, students’ inquiry abilities, and factors affecting motivation are discussed.

As the demands of society are changing, a continuous adaptation of modules is needed on what to teach, how it should be taught, and ways to assess it. Therefore, the aim was to investigate how to constructively align learning outcomes, teaching-and-learning activities, and assessment tasks of a mathematics methodology module. The sample consisted of three mathematics teacher educators and 42 mathematics pre-service teachers purposively selected from a South African university. This qualitative study adopted the three phases of design-based research (DBR) (preliminary, teacher experiment, and retrospective) to collect data from learning guides, literature, surveys, and online reflections. Qualitative data were inductively coded, whereafter responses were quantified at a descriptive level. The findings revealed six learning outcomes sequenced from lower to higher levels of understanding, comprising affective, psychological, epistemological, pedagogical, curricular, and sociological dimensions. Eight teaching-and-learning activities allowed mathematics pre-service teacher involvement in achieving the learning outcomes. These activities were evaluated through various assessment tasks that mirrored the learning outcomes. This alignment provides information about knowledge, skills, and values to consider in preparing mathematics pre-service teachers for the teaching profession. This study contributes to existing studies on constructive alignment (CA) by showing how the phases of DBR can assist in redesigning a mathematics methodology module, simultaneously enhancing theory and practice, and so paving the way for course amendments to improve learning in diverse contexts. This study opens doors for further investigation in establishing design principles for implementing CA in university-level modules.

Problem-solving before instruction has been shown to be a more effective learning design than traditional tell-and-practice for several mathematical concepts at the secondary school level. In particular, the more a problem-solving before instruction design follows the productive failure principles, such as comparing and contrasting student-generated solutions, the higher the effect on students’ conceptual understanding and transfer. University mathematics education poses several inherent constraints that complicate the implementation of these principles. In the present study, we implemented a problem-solving before instruction design in a university linear algebra course adhering to the productive failure principles as closely as possible. Participation in the preparatory problems was voluntary. We investigated the effect on students’ learning over four one-year iterations in a design-based research approach. Compared to the baseline (aggregate of cohorts prior to the intervention), we observed a significant increase in final exam performance for all four cohorts with effect sizes between Cohen’s d = 0.28 and d = 0.59. For students who agreed to further analyses, our results show that up to 16% of the variance in students’ performance can be explained by variance in their participation in the problem-solving before instruction design. As our design did not include a control group, we refrain from conclusions regarding any design components that might have caused these effects. However, these results are promising, given that our implementation involved only minor changes to the original course structure and required little extra time for students.

Illustrative examples demonstrate how abstract information can be applied in real-world. In the context of advancing evidence-informed teaching practice, the current intervention study investigated to what extent student teachers should be supported in learning educational theories and findings by different example-based approaches. Conducting a 1 × 3-factorial design, N = 105 student teachers were randomly assigned to three experimental groups: After a pre-test, all groups received the same learning instruction on the topic of cooperative learning. Then, (1) n = 35 students were prompted to generate own examples for the instructional text, (2) n = 35 students received examples along with the text, and (3) n = 35 students studied the text only, without any prompts or examples. In a post-questionnaire, it was retrospectively assessed how students perceived their learning control in engaging with the material; in a post-test, knowledge retention and knowledge transfer were measured. As assumed, findings revealed that generating examples enhanced perceived learning control and learning outcomes compared to studying provided examples. Students who learned with the instructional text only achieved lowest learning outcomes; but contrary to the expectations, these students perceived their learning control comparably high as those who generated examples. Mediation analyses indicated that for students who received illustrative examples or the instructional text only, a greater learning control perception was positively associated with knowledge retention, subsequently enhancing knowledge transfer. The study underscores the benefits of illustrative examples in teacher education, particularly when students engage in generating them. It suggests further examination of how and why example generation facilitates learning.

Computer-supported collaborative argumentation (CSCA) is an effective pedagogy to help deepen the learners’ understanding of content knowledge and develop their 21st-century competencies such as communication and collaboration skills, as well as creative and inventive thinking. In this study, the Spiral Model of Collaborative Knowledge Improvement (SMCKI) was employed to script learners’ CSCA in a secondary school classroom in Singapore. This exploratory study examined whether students’ argumentation artifacts, English language writing, and argumentation writing improved through the scripted CSCA activity. The results showed that students improved in both English language writing and argumentation writing quality across the various phases of SMCKI. The implications of these findings for the design and implementation of scripted CSCA in authentic classroom teaching and learning settings are discussed.

Prior research has shown that Productive Failure (PF), where learners attempt (and fail) to solve a problem prior to receiving instruction, is more effective for conceptual knowledge acquisition than receiving instruction first (Direct Instruction; DI). Higher diversity in generated solution attempts seemed positively associated with conceptual knowledge acquisition. The present study investigated whether observing another student’s attempts to solve the problem prior to receiving instruction (i.e., Vicarious Failure; VF) is as beneficial as PF for conceptual knowledge acquisition in mathematics and whether this depends on the diversity in the observed solution attempts. In the high solution diversity condition (VF-high), students observed five solution attempts that (taken together) included all four components of the to-be-learned canonical solution, while in the low diversity condition (VF-low), the solution attempts included only two of these components. Secondary education students (n = 152) were randomly assigned to one of four conditions: PF, VF-high, VF-low, and Direct Instruction (DI). As expected, students in the VF-high condition significantly outperformed students in the VF-low and DI conditions and performed as well as students in the PF condition on the conceptual knowledge posttest. Surprisingly, the PF effect found in previous studies was not replicated, i.e., the PF condition descriptively seemed to outperform the DI condition, but this difference was not statistically significant. Our findings provide further insight into the mechanisms that explain why engaging with problems prior to instruction is effective, suggesting that students’ activation of prior knowledge is more critical than whether they experience failure first hand.

Early mathematics education presents middle-school students with the challenge of adding and subtracting negative integers. This paper reports on results from the experimental implementation of a proposed educational design for integer arithmetic that utilized the number-line (NL) form as a resource for students to enact simple addition and subtraction problems under two conditions: (1) a body-scale floor-based NL, where arithmetic operations are enacted by walking; and (2) a regular desk-based NL supplemented with an action-figure for re-enacting the floor-based solutions. This design is the first iteration of a design-based research project and was developed based on the experience of the first author’s five years teaching in this topic. 15 Grade 7 students participated in the project’s pilot study that centered on how students coordinate procedurally analogous calculation activities across the large and small NL. The activity elicited students’ implicit confusions surrounding integer subtraction, thus creating opportunities for corrective intervention. Analyses also generated operative inferences shaping the subsequent design iteration. Implications are drawn more broadly for enactive mathematics pedagogy, particularly through the lens of comparing students’ egocentric orientations toward immersive instantiations of cultural–historical mathematical forms to their allocentric perceptual orientations toward the normative forms of the same concepts. As Extended Reality (XR, e.g. virtual reality, augmented reality) experiences enter mathematics classrooms, it may become vital to develop pedagogical methodologies in support of coordinating conceptually complementary perceptual perspectives.

Although previous studies have revealed that knowledge gaps, which refer to differences in what individuals want to know and what they already know, lead to curiosity, students may not experience curiosity for every phenomenon they believe they lack the knowledge of. Herein, we empirically examined the reasons for not feeling curious about the unknown when recognizing science-related knowledge gaps, with a specific focus on interest. Two consecutive studies were conducted. In Study 1, we investigated the association between curiosity arousal and a feeling of interest using the chi-square, Breslow–Day, and Cochran–Mantel–Haenszel tests. In Study 2, we utilized a mixed-method approach to examine whether students’ individual and situational interests could predict curiosity arousal. Twenty-five sixth-grade students participated in Study 1, and six of them participated in Study 2. Based on the results of our study, we observed a robust connection between curiosity and interest, irrespective of students’ level of science curiosity or knowledge gap. Notably, contextualized curiosity, which is aroused when recognizing knowledge gaps within specific contexts, presented a stronger association with situational interest. By contrast, decontextualized curiosity, which is aroused when recognizing knowledge gaps not specific to a particular context, exhibited an association with individual interest. However, interest alone does not account for all instances of curiosity arousal, as indicated by exceptions where it is challenging to attribute the arousal of curiosity solely to interest. We discussed the interpretation and limitations of these results, as well as their implications for education and future research.

In classrooms that implement student-driven, collaborative knowledge building, there is a lot for teachers to attend to in student work, alongside numerous ways of interpreting and responding to what is noticed, giving rise to countless possibilities of furthering students’ inquiry and discourse. The current study aims to make sense of these possibilities by identifying patterns in a veteran teacher’s reflective noticing of student inquiry in two Grade 5 classrooms. Using a Knowledge Building approach, the fifth graders studied the human body systems supported by a collaborative online environment (Knowledge Forum) over an eight-month period. The teacher kept weekly journals to record her reflective noticing of student inquiry and envisioning (planning) of possible ways to facilitate deeper knowledge building work. Using a grounded theory approach, we analyzed the teacher’s reflective journal entries to identify critical themes characterizing the teacher’s attention, interpretation, and planning of responsive moves. Visual network analysis further traced multiple pathways of teacher noticing and envisioning, each involving attending to specific changes in student inquiry and discourse, interpreting these changes within a temporal context, and envisioning responsive actions that could be taken up with her students. The teacher’s responsive moves focused on leveraging student-generated ideas to unfold new possibilities of deepening, expanding, or better co-regulating their inquiry and discourse. The findings shed light on how teachers may work with emergent processes of student-driven inquiry to scaffold ever-deeper knowledge building in a collaborative community.

Abstract

The purpose of the study was to investigate (a) whether the effects of hand tracing and whole-body tracing reported in the literature could be extended to adults, and (b) the relative superiority of whole-body tracing over hand tracing. Two experiments were conducted to investigate the potential effects of these two kinesthetic approaches on learning outcomes, cognitive load, and intrinsic motivation. The results of Experiment 1 revealed that hand tracing enhanced germane load contingent upon a low-to-medium level of perceived difficulty. This effect disappeared in Experiment 2 where additional measures were taken to improve treatment fidelity. The findings of Experiment 2 revealed the beneficial effects of whole-body tracing on germane load, extraneous load, interest, and self-monitoring, some of which were dependent upon learners’ perceived difficulty and invested effort. These findings, along with implications, limitations, and future research directions, were discussed within the framework of cognitive load theory and embodied cognition theory.

Abstract

Peer feedback is widely applied to support peer learning and accumulating studies pointed out that feedback features directly impact its learning benefits. However, existing peer feedback studies provide limited insights into group-level peer feedback activities in authentic classrooms. This study conducted group-level peer feedback activity in social studies classrooms of a Singapore secondary school. Fourteen groups of students (N = 61, Female = 61) participated in group-level peer feedback during the computer-supported collaborative argumentation activities. Students’ collaborative argumentation and peer feedback were collected. Paired sample t-test was conducted to compare each group’s argumentation performance before and after peer feedback activity. Qualitative content analysis was implemented to identify the cognitive and affective features of peer feedback given and received by more-improvement groups and less-improvement groups. A comparison of the feature networks between two student groups revealed the effective practices of peer feedback. The results demonstrated the key role of the specific solution when student groups gave and received peer feedback apart from problem identification and general suggestions. Besides, providing peer feedback at the overall argumentation level was found to be more beneficial than a word or evidence level. When receiving feedback, the use of hedge was found to bring more group improvement than mitigation language. These findings highlight the important features of peer feedback in group-level peer feedback activities, providing insights for the design and instruction of group-level peer feedback activities in authentic classrooms.

The rising application of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) tools like ChatGPT, Bing Chat, and Bard in language teaching and learning heralds a transformative era. Yet, the experiences and perspectives of university students on integrating these tools into their translation studies remain underexplored. This qualitative study, conducted in a research-intensive, Sino-foreign cooperative university in southern China, explored university students’ perceived benefits and challenges of utilizing GenAI in translation practices, as well as their preferred support mechanisms for addressing encountered issues. Data was collected through open-ended questionnaires and semi-structured interviews and analyzed by using reflexive thematic analysis. Results underscored the advantages of GenAI in enhancing translation efficiency, quality, learning, and practice, fostering a positive outlook and social benefits. Nevertheless, issues such as adequacy, prompt engineering efficacy, practical application, technical limitations, accountability, transparency, and potential AI dependency were noted. Beyond existing self-help strategies, there was an expressed need for additional guidance from educators and institutions. This study enriches our comprehension of how university students perceive and engage with GenAI tools in translation, offering insights for educators and academic institutions to optimize future teaching strategies. It also outlines the study’s limitations and proposes directions for subsequent research.

Exploratory learning before instruction typically benefits conceptual understanding compared to traditional instruction-first methods. The current study examined whether different exploration prompts impact students’ exploration approaches and learning outcomes, using a quasi-experimental design. Undergraduate students (N = 164) in psychological statistics courses were taught the procedure and concepts of standard deviation. Students in the instruct-first condition received direct instruction then a practice problem. Students in the explore-first conditions attempted the problem before instruction, with exploration prompts differing between conditions. Students in the explore-first invent condition were asked to invent a formula; students in the explore-first generate condition were asked to come up with different ways of measuring consistency. Students in the explore-first generate condition scored significantly higher on procedural knowledge (problem solving) than in the explore-first invent condition, conceptual knowledge than in both other conditions, and preparation for future learning (transfer) than in the instruct-first condition. Students in the explore-first invent condition scored no differently on any learning outcomes than in the instruct-first condition. Students given the strategy generation prompt more broadly explored different strategies during the exploration activity, but used fewer correct solution steps than those given the invention prompt. Broader exploration—and not accuracy—was associated with higher conceptual knowledge. Conversely, students in the instruct-first condition used fewer, more accurate, strategies on the activity compared to the explore-first conditions. They also showed greater misconceptions during the activity and posttest, indicating superficial understanding. Both explore-first conditions induced greater awareness of knowledge gaps compared to the instruct-first condition. Generating multiple strategies likely helped students discern important problem features, deepening conceptual structures that supported learning even beyond the initial lesson.