Computers and Education Open最新文献

The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) as a subject into K-12 education worldwide is still in its early stages and undoubtedly needs further investigation. There is limited effort on understanding policymakers, teachers and students’ viewpoints on AI learning within the school system. This study gathered the thoughts of key stakeholders, including policymakers, higher education and K-12 teachers, and students in Nigeria, to understand their conceptions, concerns, and dispositions, with the aim of aiding the implementation of AI in schools. We further explored the needs of the diverse stakeholders, how they can be supported and juxtaposed their views to identify their priorities and how their opinions combined could give a holistic approach to the effective implementation of AI education. This research employed a qualitative methodology using semi-structured interviews as the means of data collection. The thematic analysis of the interview data from the 21 participants indicates their conceptions, what they considered the priorities for including AI in the school system, concerns and support needed to implement AI in schools. The findings of this study contribute to the ongoing conversation on how to effectively integrate AI into school curriculum.

Studies have suggested that virtual reality (VR) as an ‘empathy-making machine’ has the potential to trigger historical empathy. Different VR technologies offer different levels of immersion with different educational implications. Higher immersive VR technology has shown promise in enhancing learners’ empathy levels. However, how highly immersive VR promotes learners’ historical empathy in real-life classroom settings has not been explored. Hence, this study focuses on comparing two levels of immersive VR-supported learning for historical empathy acquisition among secondary learners. A total of 49 students were recruited. A quasi-experimental design was employed and the quantitative and qualitative data were analyzed to explore participants’ historical knowledge and empathy. The quantitative data show no significant difference between immersive virtual reality (IVR) approach-supported learning and flatscreen VR-supported learning. However, the qualitative analysis suggests that the students from the IVR group showed stronger ‘physical empathy’. Intriguingly, even though the tests did not demonstrate that the students learned more in IVR-supported learning, they self-reported that they learned better in IVR-supported learning. The paper identifies implications for the connection between ‘physical empathy’ and the level of immersive technology.

Etextbooks have the affordance of providing immediate feedback for review questions on the content. However, it needs to be clarified what type and placement of feedback is most effective. College and high school students (N = 390) were randomly assigned to receive either correct-answer-only feedback or elaborative feedback either in the middle-and-end of the textbook excerpt or the end only. Elaborative feedback at the end of the text had more accurate posttest scores and more efficient learning (based on time reading per correct answer) than did other conditions. Metacomprehension accuracy, based on the difference between predicted performance and actual performance, did not reliably differ by condition. Neither the perceived difficulty of the text nor the review questions reliably differed based on feedback condition. This study has practical implications for the design of etextbooks provided the findings generalize across disciplines and entire etextbooks.

This study explored the gap between teachers' perceptions of their teaching practice and students' abilities to describe their learning accurately. Using the Verso software as a reflective feedback tool alongside a personalised professional learning program, the research aimed to bridge this disconnect. Post-implementation, student feedback indicated heightened self-awareness and improved metacognitive skills. The Verso software prompted students to engage with their learning introspectively, enabling learners to develop increasingly accurate self-reflective and metacognitive skills. The findings highlight the potential of technology in enhancing professional learning and instructional efficacy.

The use of immersive Virtual Reality (IVR) has witnessed an increasing demand in online learning, though challenges are slowing its adoption. This paper presents a scoping review on the deployment of IVR in online learning: its utilisation, challenges, and opportunities. The study reveals that IVR is mainly used to provide remote access to learning experiences, improve cognitive, affective and skills outcomes, and simulate experiences that are often available in traditional classrooms. Hardware-related issues are among the greatest challenges for the ubiquitous use of IVRs in online learning, with internet access being cited as the primary concern. Cost of hardware, physical side-effects, software design and amount of educator training required have also been raised as common challenges. The analysis of the reported opportunities revealed that the increasing availability of VR technologies shows the potential to overcome these challenges associated with hardware, where smartphone devices are still considered the most accessible and scalable tool. In addition, the increasing availability of modelling software creates an opportunity for faster and cheaper development of VR applications. Furthermore, the use of IVR in online learning presents solutions to common online learning issues associated with reduced student engagement and learning, access to work-based activities and lack of connectedness.

It is common for contemporary schools to have a presence on social media for the purpose of connecting with the school community and often the wider public. Drawing on the perspectives of five Australian non-government principals, the study explored why schools engaged with social media and the approaches used to manage the school's social media activities. We found that the main perceived value was in marketing the school to prospective families, which required active curation of posts and comments to ensure a positive image was presented and maintained. We further found that principals consider social media platforms to be neutral mechanisms for communication, not dissimilar to previous forms of communication long used by schools to engage with their communities. When viewed through a data justice lens, we argue that these views result in unintended consequences by presenting an image of the school that does not represent the diversity of its students and activities and by perpetuating the exploitative practices of commercial platforms that commodify students’ data. There are also missed opportunities for schools to better promote their educational goals and activate students as agents in representing themselves online and developing their data literacy. We propose that by adopting the term ‘schoolfeeds’ we can promote a more critical engagement with school social media that can lead to better policy and practice.

The importance of educational technologies continues to be revealed in contemporary classrooms and has consequently resulted in calls for those in initial teacher education programs to engage with contexts in which they can develop and demonstrate their technological, pedagogical and content knowledge (TPACK). Despite TPACK being one of the world's most frequently used frameworks for understanding teachers’ technology integration (Hew et al., 2019; Niederhauser & Lindström, 2018), conceptualisations of the contexts in which pre-service teachers develop and demonstrate their TPACK are often confined to physical locations (Phillips et al., 2016; Phillips, 2016b; Rosenberg & Koehler, 2015). This research takes a broader consideration of ‘context’ through explorations of empirical data from a study of Australian pre-service teachers (PSTs) collaboratively planning, delivering and reflecting on team-taught, online, high school STEM classes in an attempt to answer the research question driving this research: What contextually situated learning process shape pre-service teachers’ TPACK development? Data from a series of semi-structured interviews revealed changes in the ways in which pre-service teachers conceptualised their TPACK. More importantly, this study found that the situated learning processes of induction, transferability, positive interdependence, synchronicity, and negotiability (Johnson and Johnson, 1994; Dillenbourg, 1999) were particularly important in explaining how participants understood and explained their TPACK acquisition and enactment. This research also highlights the importance of intentional design decisions by teacher educators to consider broader conceptualisations of ‘contexts’ which illustrate the importance of situated and collaborative learning opportunities to shape pre-service teachers TPACK. Importantly, these designs in this setting also empowered pre-service teachers to take risks with their praxis as they reported a feeling of emotional safety when teaching with a liminal peer. Consequently, the power of collaborative processes and interactions were revealed as new contextual considerations in the TPACK framework.

The rural schooling environment in the Global South, such as South Africa, faces unique challenges due to low socio-economic status, lack of resources and poor funding. The frequent integration of technologies favoured by these rural teachers suggests, consciously or unconsciously, the development of technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPACK). However, the process of construction and development of this specialized knowledge remains largely unknown. It is also unclear how TPACK evolves in teachers in rural schools in the Global South, particularly those who did not receive formal or informal technology instruction during their initial teacher training or through professional teacher development training. This study adopted Vygotsky's socio-cultural theory and Koehler and Mishra's TPACK framework and collected data through questionnaires, semi-structured interviews and sharing circles. Findings revealed that while teachers show varying levels of TPACK, the context-specific, dynamic nature of TPACK was evident, as teachers often developed this knowledge incrementally and informally. The chapter indicates that despite the absence of structured training, teachers have begun to integrate technology into their pedagogy and content knowledge. However, their development of TPACK is uneven and emerging and often driven by personal initiative. The study concludes that for effective technology integration, teacher training programs should encompass TPACK's nuanced, contextual, and evolving aspects. Implications suggest that mentoring and continuous professional development are essential to enhance teachers’ technological integration skills, thereby improving teaching and learning in rural settings. Implications underscore the importance of continuous professional development and the establishment of supportive school cultures to nurture technology integration, thereby contributing to the pedagogical evolution in rural South African schools.

The problem of context, contextualization, and XK has stalked TPACK since its inception. We suggest that efforts in education technology to deepen the theory and scholarship around this domain of knowing have run up against the field's tendency toward discrete interpretations of TPACK, its continued reluctance to explore socio-cultural influences on education and technology, and the inherent tensions between abstracted theoretical models and the realities of practice they represent. Additionally, context raises important ethical considerations that are deeply embedded in educational technology selection and use. In an attempt to reject the binary of theory and practice and also extend the relationships between contextual and ethical knowledge in TPACK, we propose ways the field can extend both research and practice related to XK through reflective practice, professional ethics, and technoskeptical dispositions. Using examples from classroom practices, we have developed reflective and critical questions to elicit connections between TPACK, XK, and ethics which include hyper-local and narrow contexts as well as broader socio-cultural contexts. Intersecting ethics with TPACK helps educators situate the profession of education within society; consider the broad social implications of technology, pedagogy, and content separately and as TPACK; and work toward commitments for learning and social justice through the actions of the good enough.

This paper presents the development of a novel orchestration tool that predicts collaborative problem-solving (CPS) behaviors of undergraduate engineering groups and investigates the use of that tool by instructors. We explore the impact of receiving real-time, machine-learning, model-based prompts on 1) instructors’ orchestration strategies, which are strategies instructors use to manage and facilitate collaborative activities, and 2) groups’ participation, including how groups are engaged in CPS activities. The orchestration tool is a dashboard that notifies instructors of—and advises them on—monitoring and intervening with groups who may need collaborative support and guidance. We describe the accuracy of the models in predicting CPS behaviors and of instructors in identifying these behaviors in the classroom. We then describe how real-time prompts from models can affect instructors’ orchestration strategies and students’ participation. Our findings show that there is variability in the accuracy of our machine learning models and that instructors are better at identifying predictive behaviors as compared to the models. Instructors in this context engaged in orchestration strategies, like monitoring and probing when using the orchestration tool, and groups of students were largely talking while on-task across classes. We triangulate across data sources to examine the effectiveness of the orchestration tool in the classroom and share pedagogical and technical implications for the field.