: Epistemic agency is situated within social, cultural, and material contexts of learning; it is constantly changing as learners build knowledge. We examine how the epistemic agency of children and parents shifted as they invented a prosthetic hand using robotic elements in a museum-based makerspace.
Extended design research yielded a situative approach to designing online instruction with some evidence and strong potential for scalability. This approach maximizes productive disciplinary engagement via public discussion of student “wikifolios” in threaded comments. Formative self-assessments and automated quizzes minimize grading and private instructor interaction with students while supporting and documenting achievement. This approach can be implemented in any modern learning management system or using Google tools. It was successfully used to scale up an online course for hundreds of open learners. But an extended partnership to scale out at a fully online high school revealed that educators who were unfamiliar and/or uncomfortable with sociocultural theory found the approach difficult to implement. In response, five design principles have been reframed as fourteen specific steps that do not require familiarity with sociocultural theory. This promises to help users learn how the approach works while designing, delivering, and scaling courses.
In this study, we: (a) compared the differences in the learning of friction concepts between a physical manipulative tool (PMT) and a visuohaptic simulation (VHS) in four different configurations (visually enhanced feedback on/off, force feedback on/off), and (b) analyzed the influence of the visual and haptic feedback for learning the concept of friction. Specifically, this study explored the role of an object’s size in friction. In a three-stage experiment (i.e., pre-test, experimentation, and post-test), 206 undergraduate students compared the friction force, speed, acceleration, and traveled distance between two cubes with the same weight but different sizes pushed on a smooth surface. Our results suggest that (a) VHS was an effective tool for promoting the learning of friction concepts actively, (b) learners in the VHS condition outperformed the learners in the PMT condition (PMT < VHS), (c) the easy identification of the forces by enhanced visual cues promoted the acquisition of scientific knowledge, (d) the haptic feedback promoted a grounded experience for learning about friction, and (e) learners in the Sequenced (H→H + V) condition had more learning benefits than the Simultaneous (H + V), Visual, and Haptic conditions. Students in the Sequenced (H→H + V) condition took advantage of the affordances of the virtual and physical manipulatives. The implication for teaching and learning is that the virtual and physical affordances of the learning tools and the students’ prior knowledge must be considered in the design of the VHS to enhance learning. For the education research, the study implied that body actions positively impacted the learning experience.
This poster explores a new context and design to learn to visualize data, the social media-based #tidytuesday weekly challenge. We use a novel data source for understanding learning —tweets from participation individuals over more than one year—and a combination of qualitative and computational research methods. The content individuals shared explained, qualified, or highlighted the substance of the visualizations they created, and participation over time (and longer code) was related to being recognized more by others.
The concept of equivalence can be elusive to students and can be confounded with unproductive understandings of the equals sign. Using the game-based digital algebraic notation system, From Here to There! (FH2T), students explore ideas of equivalence by dynamically transforming expressions or equations among mathematically equivalent states. In fall of 2019, 409 middle-school students completed a randomized control trial where they worked in either GM or an online problem set control over four half-hour sessions during their math block. We found that students in the FH2T condition showed enhanced performance over the control (p=.043, ηp =.010). We will describe the FH2T technology, describe our results, and discuss implications for the usefulness of digital environments in mathematics education.
Computing education research has yet to think about how instructors use embodied actions and ideas when teaching the skills involved in "doing and learning" computing. In this paper, we describe two case studies of computing instructors using embodied representations in the form of gestures, embodied language, and tool use to teach recursion. We used grounded theory to analyze a set of naturalistic video recordings of undergraduate computing professors teaching recursion to their class. We contribute a conceptual framework of the kinds of embodied representations teachers use in computing classrooms as the first step towards understanding how embodiment support student learning.
This research uses a framing perspective to examine how pre-service teachers (PSTs) conceptualize cognitive demand when selecting tasks. Our results show that PSTs’ operationalizations of cognitive demand are context dependent. Within their methods class, PSTs largely think of cognitive demand in terms of how it promotes understanding of mathematics. When PSTs interact with students, they tend to operationalize cognitive demand as a way to support perceived student disposition and ability, or as a way to determine problem difficulty.
Designing embedded teacher-support structures within computer-supported collaborative learning environments is key to successful facilitation of group collaboration. Previous work has designed and examined various orchestration tools for teachers facilitating groups of learners, including the integration of a data visualization dashboard for teachers to simultaneously monitor multiple classroom groups. However, few studies have investigated to what extent and which supports are needed to monitor groups while students engage in a game-based collaborative learning environment. This paper proposes a theory-driven design framework for building teacher dashboards and examines the specific functions and design features needed.
: This study explores how upper elementary students develop mathematical models within an integrated science and engineering unit. We collected and coded student explanations from two fifth-grade classrooms. Results indicate that students used mathematical reasoning to create mathematical models of science phenomena. However, some students struggled and instead created descriptive models. These findings highlight the role of mathematical concepts and reasoning associated with science processes in supporting mathematical modeling in upper elementary science instruction.
