'Now you know what you’re doing right and wrong!' Peer feedback quality in synchronous peer assessment in secondary education

This study explores the effects of peer assessment (PA) practice on peer feedback (PF) quality of 11th grade secondary education students (N= 36). The PA setting was synchronous: anonymous assessors gave immediate PF using mobile response technology during 10 feedback occasions. The design was quasi-experimental (experimental vs. control condition) in which students in one condition received a scaffold to filter out relevant information they received. It was expected that this filter-out scaffold would influence PF quality in subsequent tasks in which they were assessors. PF content analysis showed that offering multiple PF occasions improved PF quality: messages contained more negative verifications and informative and suggestive elaborations after the intervention. However, no effects were found of filtering out relevant information on PF quality. Moreover, students’ perceived peer feedback skills improved which was in correspondence with their actual quality improvement over time. Additionally, the perceived usefulness of the received feedback was rated high by all participants

Learning environment, interaction, sense of belonging and study success in ethnically diverse student groups

The purpose of this paper was to investigate a model for describing the relationships between the extent to which learning environments are activating and students' interaction with teachers and peers, sense of belonging, and study success. It was tested whether this model holds true for both ethnic minority students and ethnic majority students. A total of 523 students from four different universities completed a questionnaire. Structural equation modeling (Amos) was used to test the model. The model that best describes the relationships in the group of ethnic minority students (N = 145) was shown to be different than the model that best fits the group of majority students (N = 378). Ethnic minority students appeared to feel at home in their educational program if they had a good formal relationship with teachers and fellow students. Ethnic minority students' sense of belonging to the institution nevertheless did not contribute to their study progress. On the other hand, in majority students, informal relationships with fellow students were what led to a sense of belonging. In these students, the sense of belonging did further academic progress

Teachers valuation and implementation of formative assessment strategies in elementary science classrooms.

Formative assessment is frequently used by educators, but when asked to define, responses tend to vary widely. In essence, formative assessment is when teachers and students engage in instructional conversations discussing content information and gathering data about present levels of understanding. This feedback exchanged between teachers and students about knowledge gained is a critical element that provides structure and support to move student learning forward. For teachers who effectively use formative assessment strategies, it is the responsive element of adjusting lesson plans, instruction and assessments to give students multiple avenues to develop deeper understanding and to address student learning needs. For students it is the clarification provided by the teacher to link what was known, to what is known to achieve desired learning. In this study elementary teachers in one school district were surveyed by means of a questionnaire to ascertain their perspectives on value and implementation of formative assessment. Four teachers were selected for intensive observations of science lessons utilizing what each perceived to be formative assessment strategies. This study used a mixed methods approach to analyze data from three sources: a questionnaire, classroom observations and teacher interviews. Factor analysis and confirmatory structural equation modeling were used to determine the validity of the questionnaire about teacher\u27s beliefs and use of formative assessment strategies; SEM also provided underlying structural relationships of formative assessment strategies. Teachers\u27 value of formative assessment strategies strongly correlated with their reported use of same strategies. Regression analysis determined no significant correlation between years of experience and use of formative assessment. Interview analysis of case studies indicated that those who had a more student-focused or constructivist approach to science teaching, were more likely to effectively use a wider variety of formative assessment strategies in their instruction; conversely, teacher-focused instructors used fewer formative assessment strategies and did not exemplify those characteristics a constructivist philosophy. A Teacher Profile has been proposed which categorizes teaching behaviors that are more consistent with who embodies the knowledge, beliefs and dispositions about effective formative assessment. This profile has suggested uses for university teacher educators, education administrators, professional development trainers, and professional learning communities

Focus-on-form through collaborative scaffolding in expert-to-novice online interaction

Synchronous Computer-mediated communication (CMC) creates affordable learning conditions to support both meaning-oriented communication and focus-on-form reflection that play an essential role in the development of language competence. This paper reports how corrective feedback was negotiated through expert-to-novice collaborative efforts and scaffolding with 30 subjects working on three different tasks—jigsaw, spot-the-differences and open-ended question. The findings reveal that text chats supported the focus-on-form procedure through collaborative engagement. Despite the fact that the experts were able to provide step-by-step scaffolding at the right moment to call learners’ attention to non-target-like-forms that resulted in error corrections, they needed to be made aware of not over-intervening as students reported interference between the expert's goals and the learner's. To maintain intersubjectivity, the use of both L2 and L1 shaped the route taken by experts and learners alike to negotiate L2 forms for both syntactic and lexical errors. The study concluded that it was not easy to provide corrective feedback and to attend to linguistic errors in a timely fashion during the meaning-based interaction. The long-term effect of focus-on-form procedures on L2 development through CMC remain to be explored in future studies

Activating a Research Context in Art and Design Practice

Practice-based research in art and design is the focus of postgraduate programmes at many universities. The term is useful when practice constitutes a critical part of the research methodology resulting in a form of research through practice. This study uses one such postgraduate programme to examine student researchers’ understanding of their practice-based research methods, organisation of their studio processes and awareness of learning. A structured interview was used to investigate: 1) how artists and designers use documentation as part of their creative practice; 2) what forms and processes constitute this activity; 3) what the artist’s or designer’s perception is of the role documentation plays in their practice-based research and 4) the perceived positive or negative impacts resulting from the practice of active documentation of creative work. The context of the work is the wider debate around defining the role of the artefact as part the research process in art and design and the relationship between linguistic and non-linguistic components in the articulation of practice-based research. The results reveal some of the ways in which new researchers begin to understand and ultimately take control of their working methods, including the generation of new artefacts, the implementation of acquired knowledge and communication about significant processes. The results add to our understanding of the way in which artists and designers perceive the transition from professional practice to research practice

Fostering reflection in the training of speech-receptive action

Dieser Aufsatz erörtert Möglichkeiten und Probleme der Förderung kommunikativer Fertigkeiten durch die Unterstützung der Reflexion eigenen sprachrezeptiven Handelns und des Einsatzes von computerunterstützten Lernumgebungen für dessen Förderung. Kommunikationstrainings widmen sich meistens der Förderung des beobachtbaren sprachproduktiven Handelns (Sprechen). Die individuellen kognitiven Prozesse, die dem sprachrezeptiven Handeln (Hören und Verstehen) zugrunde liegen, werden häufig vernachlässigt. Dies wird dadurch begründet, dass sprachrezeptives Handeln in einer kommunikativen Situation nur schwer zugänglich und die Förderung der individuellen Prozesse sprachrezeptiven Handelns sehr zeitaufwändig ist. Das zentrale Lernprinzip - die Reflexion des eigenen sprachlich-kommunikativen Handelns - wird aus verschiedenen Perspektiven diskutiert. Vor dem Hintergrund der Reflexionsmodelle wird die computerunterstützte Lernumgebung CaiMan© vorgestellt und beschrieben. Daran anschließend werden sieben Erfolgsfaktoren aus der empirischen Forschung zur Lernumgebung CaiMan© abgeleitet. Der Artikel endet mit der Vorstellung von zwei empirischen Studien, die Möglichkeiten der Reflexionsunterstützung untersucheThis article discusses the training of communicative skills by fostering the reflection of speech-receptive action and the opportunities for using software for this purpose. Most frameworks for the training of communicative behavior focus on fostering the observable speech-productive action (i.e. speaking); the individual cognitive processes underlying speech-receptive action (hearing and understanding utterances) are often neglected. Computer-supported learning environments employed as cognitive tools can help to foster speech-receptive action. Seven success factors for the integration of software into the training of soft skills have been derived from empirical research. The computer-supported learning environment CaiMan© based on these ideas is presented. One central learning principle in this learning environment reflection of one's own action will be discussed from different perspectives. The article concludes with two empirical studies examining opportunities to foster reflecti

Classtalk: A Classroom Communication System for Active Learning

This pdf file is an article describing the advantages of using Classtalk technology in the classroom to enhance classroom communication. Classtalk technology cab facilitate the presentation of questions for small group work, collec the student answers and then display histograms showing how the class answered. This new communication technology can help instructors create a more interactive, student centered classroom, especially when teaching large courses. The article describes Classtalk as a very useful tool not only for engaging students in active learning, but also for enhancing the overall communication within the classroom. This article is a selection from the electronic Journal for Computing in Higher Education. Educational levels: Graduate or professional

Proceedings of the ECSCW'95 Workshop on the Role of Version Control in CSCW Applications

The workshop entitled "The Role of Version Control in Computer Supported Cooperative Work Applications" was held on September 10, 1995 in Stockholm, Sweden in conjunction with the ECSCW'95 conference. Version control, the ability to manage relationships between successive instances of artifacts, organize those instances into meaningful structures, and support navigation and other operations on those structures, is an important problem in CSCW applications. It has long been recognized as a critical issue for inherently cooperative tasks such as software engineering, technical documentation, and authoring. The primary challenge for versioning in these areas is to support opportunistic, open-ended design processes requiring the preservation of historical perspectives in the design process, the reuse of previous designs, and the exploitation of alternative designs. The primary goal of this workshop was to bring together a diverse group of individuals interested in examining the role of versioning in Computer Supported Cooperative Work. Participation was encouraged from members of the research community currently investigating the versioning process in CSCW as well as application designers and developers who are familiar with the real-world requirements for versioning in CSCW. Both groups were represented at the workshop resulting in an exchange of ideas and information that helped to familiarize developers with the most recent research results in the area, and to provide researchers with an updated view of the needs and challenges faced by application developers. In preparing for this workshop, the organizers were able to build upon the results of their previous one entitled "The Workshop on Versioning in Hypertext" held in conjunction with the ECHT'94 conference. The following section of this report contains a summary in which the workshop organizers report the major results of the workshop. The summary is followed by a section that contains the position papers that were accepted to the workshop. The position papers provide more detailed information describing recent research efforts of the workshop participants as well as current challenges that are being encountered in the development of CSCW applications. A list of workshop participants is provided at the end of the report. The organizers would like to thank all of the participants for their contributions which were, of course, vital to the success of the workshop. We would also like to thank the ECSCW'95 conference organizers for providing a forum in which this workshop was possible