5 research outputs found

    An Instrument to Measure Teacher Practices to Support Personalized Learning in the Middle Grades

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    Reforms to support and expand personalized learning increasingly are being introduced in middle schools across the United States. Personalization, as enacted in response to these reforms, encourages teachers to implement many practices that long have been recommended by advocates of middle grades philosophy. To better understand the practices of middle grades teachers working in schools attempting to implement personalized learning, this article presents a survey instrument to measure teacher practices for personalization in the middle grades. The article describes the formulation and initial administrations of the survey to 232 teachers in 2016 and 165 teachers in 2017. Exploratory factor analysis provided evidence for the presence of factors describing practices for personalized assessment, out-of-school learning, whole group learning in a personalized setting, and technology implementation. Confirmatory factor analysis with the follow-up sample provided additional support for this structure. Data from these two separate survey administrations demonstrated high internal consistency and moderate correlation across the groups of practices. Suggestions for future research using the tool are offered. The survey instrument is included as an appendix

    Embodied learning in a digital world: a systematic review of empirical research in K-12 education

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    There is a widespread assumption that technology-enhanced embodied learning environments, which are grounded on the notion of embodied cognition, can promote learning. The current study reviews the empirical basis of this assumption by examining literature published from 2008 to 2017 which employed technology-enhanced embodied learning environments in K-12 education. Overall, 41 journal articles were included in the review study; these were indexed in four databases (Education Research Complete [via EBSCO], ERIC, JSTOR, and Scopus) as well as in Google Scholar, or were identified via the ancestry method. As part of our analysis, we focused on the type of technology-enhanced embodied environments utilized for educational purposes, the research methods adopted for their evaluation, and the educational contexts in which they were implemented. At the core of this review study, we investigated students’ learning outcomes across the cognitive, affective, and psychomotor domains, while we examined the learning effectiveness of technology-enhanced embodied environments, as compared to other interfaces and forms of instruction. In general, the review revealed positive outcomes about the use of technology-enhanced embodied learning environments in K-12. Most of the reviewed studies were contextualized in STEM education, adopted gesture-based technologies, and evaluated students’ learning using retrospective measures grounded on pre–post-testing. Cognitive outcomes were dominant in the reviewed studies, while the evaluation of affective and psychomotor outcomes received less attention. Most of the reviewed comparative studies reported that students in the embodied learning condition had increased learning gains, when compared to their counterparts in the control or comparison groups. However, these findings should be treated with caution due to a set of methodological concerns that this review identified. We conclude this chapter with a synthesis of our findings in the form of emerged implications and we provide a set of guidelines for future research and practice in the field of technology-enhanced embodied learning environments
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