Learning and Instruction最新文献

Background

Students’ writing is being digitised to a different degree across countries, municipalities, and schools. Yet, knowledge on the effect of digitalisation remains scarce. Due to local autonomy over instructional methods, Norwegian schools portray a full array of this global diversity of practices, representing a unique naturalistic setting of digitisation, with other factors being held relatively constant.

Research aims

The study explores how elementary students’ writing is affected by to what degree students’ writing involves using digital tools and/or handwriting over the first year in school.

Sample

A total of 577 Norwegian first grade students (6 years).

Methods

In a natural experiment, students were tested for spelling ability (dictation) and for narrative text writing ability. Students wrote one text by hand and one text on a digital device and handwritten and typed texts were analysed for handwriting legibility, holistic quality, text length and compositional spelling. The statistical analysis was performed using Linear mixed-effects models.

Results

The results show that students from classes with a higher degree of digitalisation wrote longer texts with more words correctly spelled when writing on a digital device, compared to others. However, students from classes where more writing was done by hand performed better on handwriting measures.

Conclusions

We suggest that both modes convey writing proficiency, each with its specific benefits.

The paper proposes a theoretical design framework for playful assessment, emphasizing learner agency, engagement, and creativity. It argues that assessment should be a continuous, inclusive, transparent, and collaborative process, aligned with principles of equitable learning. The framework introduces “The Four Freedoms of Play” as heuristics for playful assessment, emphasizing aspects like the freedom to experiment, the freedom to fail, the freedom to try on identities, and the freedom of effort. These freedoms align with current educational research findings and the importance of learners' agency, identity safety, and sense of belonging. In summary, playful stances in assessment can expand what assessment is by creating flexible and creative assessment opportunities that center learners’ agency and identity, ultimately leading to an asset-based learning culture.

Background

Despite its important role in education, significant gaps remain in the literature on homework. Notably, there is a dearth of understanding regarding how homework effects vary across different subjects, how student backgrounds may moderate its effectiveness, what the optimal amount and distribution of homework is, and how the causal impact of homework can be disentangled from other associations.

Aims

This study examines the different effects of homework frequency and duration on student achievement in both mathematics and science while adopting a causal inference probabilistic framework.

Sample

Our data consists of a nationally representative sample of 4118 Irish eighth grade students, collected as part of TIMSS 2019.

Methods

We employ an extension of a causal inference machine learning model called Bayesian Causal Forests that allows us to consider the effect of homework on achievement in mathematics and science simultaneously. By investigating the impacts of both homework frequency and duration, we discern the optimal frequency and duration for homework in both subjects. Additionally, we explore the potential moderating role of student socioeconomic backgrounds.

Results

Daily homework benefitted mathematics achievement the most, while three to four days per week was most effective for science. Short-duration assignments proved equally as effective as longer ones in both subjects. Notably, students from advantaged socioeconomic backgrounds did not gain more from homework.

Conclusions

These findings can guide policies aimed at enhancing student outcomes while promoting a balance between academic responsibilities and extracurricular activities.

Background

Early childhood education emphasizes learning by playing. Play is self-chosen and devoid of external motivation. However, the definition of play presents a paradox in play-based learning, because the institutional framework imposes external objectives onto play.

Aims

From a cultural-historical perspective, the study examines the relationality of play and playfulness in early childhood sustainability education. By employing sphere theory and the attributes of playfulness, the study addresses the question: How can playful aspects in sustainability education permeate into children's play?

Sample

Two teachers and 39 children.

Methods

The study employed the methodologies of ethnographic research. The data consisted of video recordings (6h 37min), observational notes, and children's artifacts.

Results

The study revealed two aspects that unfold the relationality of playfulness and play in educational settings. First, the elements of playful learning activity permeate the children's sphere of staging, and second, the elements of playful learning activity permeate into the children's sphere of imagination. Both aspects show that the playful learning activity serves as the sphere of reality, bringing new concepts and ideas to children's play.

Conclusions

The knowledge children acquire in the playful sustainability education activity served as a sphere of reality that fed the sphere of imagination. Playful learning can include parts of mature play, and thus, play is not operationalized to serve learning, but in play, children reproduce and transform new knowledge blending it with their culture. Therefore, play can exist and evolve in an educational setting while respecting the freedom and intrinsic motivation of play.

Background

Feedback is important for writing improvement, but research suggests that not all learners benefit equally from feedback.

Aims

This meta-analysis examined if different feedback treatments given by different feedback agents are differentially effective for first (L1), second (L2), and foreign language (FL) learners at secondary schools and universities.

Method

Our meta-analysis included studies with an experimental or quasi-experimental design. We computed effect sizes for surface- and deep-level writing outcomes.

Results

Across 200 comparisons, surface-level feedback significantly improved surface-level outcomes (g = 0.58), with higher effects for FL (g = 0.69) than for L2 learners (g = 0.34). However, such feedback may have detrimental effects on FL deep-level outcomes (g = −0.23). In contrast, deep-level feedback demonstrated positive effects on deep-level outcomes (g = 0.80), with larger effects for L1 (g = 1.26) than for FL learners (g = 0.37; non-significant). Combined surface-and deep-level feedback positively affected both deep-level (g = 0.54) and surface-level outcomes (g = 0.36) for all learners.

Instructor feedback demonstrated overall moderate benefits for both outcomes showing greater impact on FL learners (g = 0.72) than on L2 learners (g = 0.35) for surface-level outcomes. Peer feedback showed medium to large effects for deep-level outcomes (FL learners: g = 0.76; L1 learners: g = 1.46). In contrast, algorithm-based feedback showed a non-significant medium effect on FL learners' surface-level outcomes (g = 0.53), and self-feedback showed a non-significant medium effect on FL learners’ deep-level outcomes (g = 0.55). Lastly, feedback proved effective for both university and secondary school students, thereby underscoring its crucial role in fostering writing.

Background

Inclusive education has become increasingly popular based on the assumption that it has multiple benefits for students with special educational needs (SEN). However, contradictions remain regarding the widespread nature of these benefits, particularly when it comes to academic motivation.

Aims

In this large-scale cross-sectional study, we relied on the Big-Fish-Little-Pond Effect (BFLPE) to assess the links between inclusive education and students’ academic self-concepts and learning interests in the mathematics and verbal domains.

Sample

The sample consisted of 21,219 German elementary school children in Grade 4 who were enrolled in three groups: students without SEN attending regular schools (n₁ = 19,069), students with SEN attending regular schools (n₂ = 933), and students with SEN attending special education schools (n₃ = 1214).

Methods

Doubly latent multi-group multilevel structural equation models and tests of latent interaction were performed to test the BFLPE.

Results

Results supported the BFLPE for both outcomes and domains. However, no BFLPE was identified for learning interest in the verbal domain among students with SEN attending special education schools, although the size of this effect did not differ significantly from that observed among students without SEN. In regular schools, the BFLPE was almost two times stronger among students with SEN than among their peers without SEN.

Conclusions

Results support the generalizability of the BFLPE to students with SEN, while casting doubts on the motivational benefits of inclusive education for these students. Interventions targeted at attenuating the BFLPE should thus be tailored for both regular and special education schools.

Background

Numerous studies have claimed that high variability phonetic training (HVPT) has significant efficacy in improving learners’ phonological decoding ability. Although mobile learning (ML) based HVPT program integrated with sound instructional design also demonstrated the effectiveness, its reliability and validity need to be further verified.

Aims

This study evaluated the training's efficacy in improving Chinese learners' perception and production of English words by comparing learners' brain activation changes and network connectivity changes because of the training.

Samples

Participants were 40 undergraduate students.

Methods

This study developed a Wechat application to implement a self-regulated high-variability-phonetic-training (HVPT) for 20 university students; employed a modified phonics screening test (MPST) as a benchmark test to assess learners’ phonetic decoding ability before and after the training; designed a quasi-experiment (control/experimental design) for 40 participants; most importantly, this study used a functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) device to monitor brain activation and networks synchronisation for participants in both groups before and after training.

Results

The results showed that learners' performance on 5-phoneme pseudowords was significantly improved. The training inhibited learners’ right fusiform gyrus. A significant correlation was observed between enhanced RMTG and increased testing scores.

Conclusion

The transfer effect of Mobile MVPT on long pseudowords is significant, suggesting its efficacy in helping learners apply the phonetic patterns perceived from the training to segmentally analyse new difficult words.

Background

This study is focused on students’ abilities to critically evaluate or critique the content in texts. Beyond comprehension, critique is an essential, yet underexamined, learning process in an increasingly complex and persistently inequitable world.

Aims

Students were randomly assigned to a comprehension condition (i.e., asking them to summarize each text after reading), a critique condition (i.e., asking them to critique each text after reading), or to a control group, to examine whether these task assignments improved critical reading performance.

Sample

The sample consisted of 172 online participants.

Methods

Participants completed individual difference measures; read three texts, in accordance with their experimental condition; and completed measures of critical reading, comprehension, and source recall. The texts used in this study were designed to provide limited and women-blaming arguments for declining birth rates, with these flaws intentionally introduced to foster critique.

Results

Students assigned to the critique condition performed better on one of the critical reading questions, as compared to students in the comprehension condition, but not on the other question, and not as compared to students in the control group. The extent of students’ critique generation during reading significantly predicted performance on both critical reading questions as well as source recall performance.

Conclusions

We link critique generation during processing with critical reading performance; however, we do not find that explicitly directing students to engage in critique is necessarily the most fruitful means of fostering critical reading. The range of critiques that students generated when reasoning about flawed texts are analyzed and directions for future intervention introduced.

Theoretical framework

Play is vital for children's healthy development and growth. According to the enactive framework, play can foster socialization, self-regulation and cognitive processing. When children become active participants in pleasurable activities, they engage with their environment in diverse ways, engendering new meanings and transforming existing ones. Previous studies have shown that social integration and agency can be cultivated from an early age.

Purpose or motivation

In the current study we review prior research, taking into consideration the enactive approach. From this perspective, we revalue play as a particularly fruitful activity, which enables embodied interactions between peers, contributing to participatory sense-making processes. This study examines the impact of playful enactive interventions on transformative agency and social integration.

Methods

The study involved 161 children aged 6–8 years, who attended four schools in Bariloche, Argentina. We conducted enactive interventions which propitiated playful affective instances through non-competitive play and self-awareness practices. Quantitative and qualitative analyses were performed to evaluate changes in social integration and agency in children.

Results

The children showed changes both in the social domain - including peer relationships, empathy and classroom climate - and in their capacity for agency and emotional regulation. In addition, most children reported that they continued to use the self-awareness practices in stressful situations outside of school.

Conclusion

The present study reveals that playful enactive interventions can foster agency and empathy during childhood. Embodied experiences within playful contexts may have enabled participatory sense-making processes that contributed to the recreation of peer relationships.

Background

The sophistication of young children's arithmetic problem-solving strategies can be influenced through experience and instructional intervention. One potential pathway is through encountering story problems where the location of the unknown quantity varies.

Aims

The goal of the present study is to characterize how arithmetic problem-solving strategy sophistication can evolve through opportunities to solve story problems.

Sample

We used microgenetic principles to guide the coding of arithmetic problem-solving behavior (8843 attempts) across three timescales (time within-session, attempt to solve, and between sessions) for nine story problem structures (N = 40, 19 girls). Data come from a teaching experiment conducted in a Mountain West US state in Spring 2018.

Methods

We employed a Bayesian hierarchical ordinal regression with a nine-level response variable. The model contained fixed effects for session, attempt, story problem structure; a smooth time within session effect; and random effects for student, instructor, and equation.

Results

Our analysis indicates which transitions from less to more sophisticated strategies are better supported by additional attempts to solve the same problem vs. additional instructional sessions. Strategy sophistication also varied by the location of the unknown quantity (result unknown, find difference, start unknown), but not operation (join, separate, part-whole).

Conclusions

If confirmed by other studies, including experiments, what teachers offer children in terms of learning opportunities (more attempts within the same problem or more problems across work sessions) should vary based on the transition they are making.