Educational Research Review最新文献

Leadership skills are an important area of students’ development and a key learning outcome of their university education. This systematic review aims to identify, summarise, and map out the various factors that influence university students’ leadership approaches, perceptions, and beliefs, in order to establish a more comprehensive understanding of how development in these areas can be better targeted and nurtured. Drawing on 54 empirical journal articles identified in the search stage, two main themes were identified: student-centric attributes, and environmental and contextual elements. Ranging from students’ internal self-beliefs to their immediate social situations and wider sociocultural conventions, findings from this review reveal a dynamic set of different factors that interact with one another. The findings of this review raise important implications for efforts targeting students’ leadership skills development, including the need to cultivate students’ sense of leadership self-efficacy and raise awareness of harmful social stereotypes.

Researchers disagree on the extent to which social cues in instructional videos influence learning and learning-relevant outcomes and processes. The instructor presence effect states that visible instructors in instructional videos lead to increased social presence and higher scores in subjective ratings like motivation, social presence, or affect, but do not improve learning outcomes. In contrast, the Cognitive-Affective-Social Theory of Learning in digital Environments outlines how social cues not only enhance social, emotional, and motivational processes, but they also potentially promote learning outcomes. We conducted a series of meta-analyses to explore the effects of instructor presence in instructional videos on retention, transfer, social presence, motivation, cognitive load, affect, and visual dwell time. The meta-analyses include 35 studies, which contained 46 pair-wise comparisons and 6339 participants. Results revealed a small, statistically significant positive effect of including a visual instructor on retention outcomes, but no significant effect on transfer performance. A visible instructor also significantly enhanced social presence, affective, and motivational ratings. Furthermore, we found that a visible instructor significantly reduced dwell time on relevant visual material but also reduced subjective perception of extraneous cognitive load. Significant moderator effects could be found regarding prior knowledge, the instructional domain as well as the size of the instructor.

While researchers promote the interactive learning potential of digital tools, studies reveal that teachers adapt technology to existing practice instead of using the tools' potential for student active learning. Researchers also argue that formative assessment enhances students' learning, while studies find formative assessment difficult to implement. To investigate these paradoxes and better understand how teachers use digital tools in formative assessment and with what result, we conducted a systematic review of teachers' technology use in formative assessment practices in primary and secondary education. Systematic searches identified 22 relevant articles that are included in the review. We found unclear definitions of formative assessment across studies and document challenges teachers encounter when they use technology for formative assessment purposes. We conclude with three prerequisites for teachers' successful technology use in formative assessment practices: 1) clear definitions of formative assessment, 2) alignment between digital tools and pedagogical practice, and 3) data literacy to examine and interpret information and use this to improve students’ learning. The review also documents knowledge gaps in current research.

A significant portion of the working-age population has only rudimentary literacy skills. Many people who are functionally illiterate have problems to perform basic daily tasks and to participate in society. Given the paucity of research, the aim of this study was to evaluate the effects of adult literacy interventions using a three-level meta-regression analysis, controlling for potential moderators of effectiveness. The literature search included empirical studies with a control group design in English, French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish. 39 controlled primary studies met the inclusion criteria, including 236 effect sizes. There was a small but significant main effect on participants' literacy level (g = 0.22). Interventions with a lower frequency of weekly sessions were more effective than more intensive approaches. No significant effect on effectiveness was found for total duration, context, language of instruction, teacher-student ratio, computer use, or initial literacy level of participants. As a large proportion of the primary studies were found to be at high risk of bias, more reliable primary studies are needed to support the findings and provide a more nuanced view of the effectiveness of interventions. Nevertheless, this review provides promising evidence that adults with low literacy skills can benefit from literacy interventions.

Global demands for collaborative problem solving (CPS) have sparked investigations of peer collaboration in the educational context. The aim of this systematic review was to identify and systematize research findings on (a) characteristics of productive and unproductive face-to-face (f2f) or synchronous CPS via digital devices among adolescents in the educational context, (b) training and scaffolding modalities enabling adolescents to engage in productive CPS, and (c) ways of supporting productive CPS by using digital resources. We conducted a thematic analysis of 160 selected papers from a larger corpus and identified six main themes, that is, groups of characteristics of CPS: socio-cognitive aspects; socio-emotional aspects; the quality of task/problem-solving strategies; regulation of group activity oriented towards the task; regulation of group activity oriented towards group members; and participant engagement in CPS. We found that in efforts to contribute to successful CPS, adults (teachers/researchers) can moderate peer interaction in three ways, by focusing on either cognitive processes, group discussions, or classroom management. Regarding the third goal, we identified two major roles of digital resources in adolescent CPS. The first role pertained to ICT as a source of relevant knowledge or a tool for problem solving and the other role was related to peer collaboration and ICT as a tool for scaffolding collaboration. All characteristics that emerged in this review are discussed and concluding comments refer to educational implications.

Mentoring has nowadays become a prevalent educational practice in higher education, as it allows for personalized learning trajectories and competence-based education. However, the effectiveness of mentoring programs is difficult to measure due to a lack of conceptual clarity about the mentoring concept and the broad variety of measurements used. Therefore, a systematic literature review was conducted to conceptualize mentoring by looking at the definitions, characteristics, and measurements. A total of 106 studies were reviewed and a summative content analysis was applied. The results of this study are three-fold. First, a synthesis and integration of existing definitions resulted in a newly developed, holistic definition of mentoring. Second, evidence-based characteristics of mentoring are discussed that give insights into how to design and implement mentoring programs. Third, an overview of existing mentoring measures is presented, and a subsequent in-depth analysis shows their alignment with the proposed conceptualization on mentoring.

Academic underachievement, the discrepancy between students' academic potential and performance, remains both an educational problem and a mystery after nearly a century of research. Of enduring interest has been identifying factors behind underachievement, one of which relates to students’ motivation and self-regulated learning. To explore the state of known research, we conducted a systematic and meta-analytic review of the past 80 years of empirical research comparing underachieving and non-underachieving students on various motivational and self-regulated learning correlates. Based on 1044 effect sizes from 125 studies (156 unique samples, N = 56,640 students), our overall meta-analytic findings suggested that underachieving students tend to have higher external locus of control (g = 0.30) and lower levels of competence beliefs (g = −0.48), autonomous motivation and task values (g = −0.48), self-regulated learning strategies (g = −0.59), and mastery goals (g = −0.39) relative to non-underachieving students. Differences in competence beliefs between underachieving and non-underachieving students were moderated by grade level and underachievement identification method. Implications for the theoretical bases for academic underachievement and the educational practices to reverse or prevent underachievement are discussed.

As students learn biology at different levels of education, their tenacious and inaccurate prior conceptions pose a challenge to conceptual change. Educators and researchers have developed a variety of interventions to address these misinterpretations and promote the achievement of current scientific understanding. Despite an ever-growing body of literature, no study has been conducted to date that examines the quality of interventions or their effectiveness in terms of conceptual change. We conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis of intervention studies conducted in the field of biology in order to gain insight into this phenomenon. According to the results, evolution and photosynthesis are the most common topics investigated. Overall, the results of the meta-analysis indicate that conceptual change interventions result in large effects on conceptual understanding of biological topics when compared with traditional teaching, with refutational text being the most effective single type of intervention. However, the most effective interventions dealt with more simplified phenomena, such as the cardiovascular system of the human body. It was found that the effect sizes were strongly influenced by the number of participants in the samples, as well as publication bias. A striking number of the studies reported only superficial learning outcomes, such as knowledge enrichment rather than knowledge restructuring. It is possible to use the results of this study to inform instructional choices and to carry out further research.

The aim of this systematic scoping review was to provide an overview of the physical and sensory environment factors that are related to three to six-year-old children's social and emotional development in Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) settings across different pedagogical contexts. A systematic literature search was conducted in PsycINFO, Medline and ERIC. 8378 studies were screened from 2000 to 2021. A total of 589 studies were screened at full text stage, and 20 studies were included. Eleven studies reported a physical environment factor, and one study reported a sensory environment factor that was related to children's positive social and emotional competence outcomes. Eight studies reported a physical environment factor, and three studies reported a sensory environment factor that was negatively related to a social and emotional competence outcome. Three studies reported on long-term developmental implications provided by the ECEC environment. The physical and sensory environment overlaps with the social context in which it is embedded to contribute to children's early education experiences. Future research is needed to define optimal environmental conditions and embed physical and sensory environment research in social and emotional development programs.