The effects of cross-age mentoring in an online collaborative environment

This mixed method research was designed to examine the effects of cross-age mentoring in an inter-institutional online learning community. The research questions focused on the impact of mentoring on high school students’ confidence in their information seeking skills, perceptions of their information seeking standards, and the application of these standards to an information seeking task. Also of interest was the dialogic interaction between the students at the two sites, the impact of the facilitator on the process, and the university students’ perceptions about their experience. The participants included 26 students (mentees) enrolled in an American history class at a rural high school and 18 pre-service teachers (mentors) enrolled in an introductory educational technology course. Mentoring groups comprised of four-five high school students and three-four pre-service teachers interacted via a synchronous online courseware system. Both classes met at the same time of the day, twice weekly, allowing for synchronous interactions. The project was implemented over a five week period during which pre- and post-tests of information seeking confidence and standards were administered and students were engaged in their information seeking tasks. During the course of the project the online interactions were archived and saved for later analysis. Results revealed that there was no change in the high school students’ confidence in their information seeking abilities. The assessment of their evaluative standards revealed that they became more aware of the importance of evaluating the accuracy of information they located. In addition, a positive correlation was found between their understandings of the importance of evaluating information to determine its relevance to the task at hand and the disposition toward a more expert approach to seeking information. Performance on the information seeking task was positively influenced by conceptual scaffolding provided by both the facilitator and the pre-service teachers. Feedback that encouraged the high school students to consider conceptual issues was discovered to be most effective. The findings from this research contribute to the literature on cross-age mentoring between higher education and K-12 students as well as providing insights about strategies that influence students’ abilities to locate, evaluate, and synthesize information

Information Literacy Instruction in an English Capstone Course: A Study of Student Confidence, Perception, and Practice

An English professor and an instruction librarian at the University of New Hampshire at Manchester felt that the college\u27s new English Capstone course for majors provided a unique opportunity to assess the information literacy skill levels of graduating English majors. They therefore engaged in a three-year study to evaluate the IL competency of these students, to gauge their perceptions of library instruction provided during the Capstone course and throughout their academic careers, and to determine students\u27 confidence and self-efficacy with respect to these skills. The researchers sought to determine the ways in which the IL program for English majors effectively met established IL goals and to identify areas for improvement

Prompting students' knowledge integration and ill-structured problem solving in a Web-based learning environment.

The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of different types of question prompts on students' knowledge acquisition and ill-structured problem solving outcomes. Although there are consistent findings regarding the processes of knowledge integration in science, few studies have focused on supporting students' knowledge acquisition and problem solving in more ill-structured domains. Hence, this study explored the use of knowledge integration prompts and problem solving prompts to support students' knowledge acquisition and ill-structured problem solving, especially the processes of problem representation, developing and evaluating solutions, and monitoring and justifying a plan of action.In order to investigate how such integrated understandings can be promoted in a web-based learning environment, this research used a knowledge integration approach to teaching and learning that provided a framework for promoting the application of educational concepts to classroom problems. Educational measurement served as the educational context for the focal curriculum. The curriculum design incorporated knowledge integration prompts to help students integrate knowledge, and problem solving prompts to facilitate students' problem solving processes.Students need to apply knowledge to important issues every day. Therefore, designing school curricula that foster integration of knowledge and everyday problem solving becomes critical. Students must develop integrated understandings of principles, prior experience, and applicable knowledge in order to be effective and efficient problem solvers.The research design and assessment protocols included two phases of the curriculum---knowledge acquisition phase and problem solving phase---and four treatments---knowledge integration condition, problem solving condition, combination of knowledge integration and problem solving condition, and control condition. The web-based environment was tested with undergraduate pre-service teachers. Pretest-posttest and ill-structured problem solving outcomes were compared between the treatments. Results indicated that knowledge integration prompts promoted better knowledge acquisition than did problem solving prompts. However, knowledge integration prompts alone were not completely sufficient for ill-structured problem solving. In fact, the combination of knowledge integration and problem solving prompts helped students not only integrate but also apply knowledge of principles and concepts to real-world problems. These results have implications for designing curricula in ill-defined domains and for instructional designers seeking to integrate and promote the application of educational principles to real-world problems

Online knowledge maps with automated feedback in education and assessment

Introduction: Concept and knowledge maps have been shown to promote meaningful learning, critical thinking, and transfer of knowledge. Although computer-based tools are available for concept and knowledge mapping, there is no commonly used software that can automate feedback on student-created maps. Such software is highly desirable, because manual provision of feedback on students’ maps can be logistically difficult for teachers, particularly with large student cohorts in higher education. Accordingly, a novel software tool for concept and knowledge mapping was developed and tested. Methods: 1. Online software was developed, known as Knowledge Maps, which facilitates the creation, editing, and sharing of concept and knowledge maps with automated feedback. 2. Testing and evaluation of Knowledge Maps in three respects: a. Evaluation of the usability and acceptability of Knowledge Maps by Medicine students. b. Evaluation of the objective and subjective impact on learning of the Activity mode of Knowledge Maps through two randomised crossover trials and a single-group pre-test post-test trial with Medicine and Medical Science students. c. Evaluation of the validity and reliability of the Assessment mode of Knowledge Maps by comparison of junior medical students map scores with scores for a modified essay question on the same topic. Results: Student participants reported predominantly positive experiences with using Knowledge Maps, indicating that it is an acceptable and user-friendly tool for learning. Students perceived that using Knowledge Maps had a positive impact on their learning. However, evidence of objective improvements in learning, as determined by quiz scores in evaluation studies, is difficult to ascertain. As an assessment tool, Knowledge Maps provides a similar indication of students understanding compared with modified essay questions. Moreover, all map items were highly discriminating between students of high and low levels of understanding. Conclusion: Knowledge Maps is a user-friendly, acceptable software tool that facilitates the construction of concept and knowledge maps, together with the creation of map-based learning activities and assessments. Knowledge Maps has potential to enhance learning and assessment in the biomedical sciences, and could be a useful addition to medical curricula and assessment

A study of novice programmer performance and programming pedagogy.

Identifying and mitigating the difficulties experienced by novice programmers is an active area of research that has embraced a number of research areas. The aim of this research was to perform a holistic study into the causes of poor performance in novice programmers and to develop teaching approaches to mitigate them. A grounded action methodology was adopted to enable the primary concepts of programming cognitive psychology and their relationships to be established, in a systematic and formal manner. To further investigate novice programmer behaviour, two sub-studies were conducted into programming performance and ability. The first sub-study was a novel application of the FP-Tree algorithm to determine if novice programmers demonstrated predictable patterns of behaviour. This was the first study to data mine programming behavioural characteristics rather than the learner’s background information such as age and gender. Using the algorithm, patterns of behaviour were generated and associated with the students’ ability. No patterns of behaviour were identified and it was not possible to predict student results using this method. This suggests that novice programmers demonstrate no set patterns of programming behaviour that can be used determine their ability, although problem solving was found to be an important characteristic. Therefore, there was no evidence that performance could be improved by adopting pedagogies to promote simple changes in programming behaviour beyond the provision of specific problem solving instruction. A second sub-study was conducted using Raven’s Matrices which determined that cognitive psychology, specifically working memory, played an important role in novice programmer ability. The implication was that programming pedagogies must take into consideration the cognitive psychology of programming and the cognitive load imposed on learners. Abstracted Construct Instruction was developed based on these findings and forms a new pedagogy for teaching programming that promotes the recall of abstract patterns while reducing the cognitive demands associated with developing code. Cognitive load is determined by the student’s ability to ignore irrelevant surface features of the written problem and to cross-reference between the problem domain and their mental program model. The former is dealt with by producing tersely written exercises to eliminate distractors, while for the latter the teaching of problem solving should be delayed until the student’s program model is formed. While this does delay the development of problem solving skills, the problem solving abilities of students taught using this pedagogy were found to be comparable with students taught using a more traditional approach. Furthermore, monitoring students’ understanding of these patterns enabled micromanagement of the learning process, and hence explanations were provided for novice behaviour such as difficulties using arrays, inert knowledge and “code thrashing”. For teaching more complex problem solving, scaffolding of practice was investigated through a program framework that could be developed in stages by the students. However, personalising the level of scaffolding required was complicated and found to be difficult to achieve in practice. In both cases, these new teaching approaches evolved as part of a grounded theory study and a clear progression of teaching practice was demonstrated with appropriate evaluation at each stage in accordance with action researc

An investigation into the development of English language reading comprehension among Thai undergraduate students using an online blended learning approach

This study investigated the use of a blended learning approach to the teaching of English reading comprehension in a Thai university. The study revealed while Thai learners experienced many difficulties with developing their reading comprehension, the blended learning program assisted in reducing the difficulties they experienced. The study also revealed that participants not only made significantly higher progress in the blended learning program but also enhanced their capacity for autonomous learning

Implementing and Evaluating a Scenario Builder Tool for Pediatric Virtual Patients

Baccalaureate nursing students have few opportunities to practice patient interaction be-fore they reach their clinical experiences. Traditional practice opportunities include roleplay and interviews with paid actors (called standardized patients). Unfortunately, neither of these methods realistically simulates many of the patient interactions that nurses will encounter on a daily basis. Virtual patients are computer simulations that behave in the same way that an actual patient would in a medical context. Since these characters are simulated, they can provide realistic yet repetitive practice in patient interaction since they can represent a wide range of patients and each scenario can be practiced until the student achieves competency. However, the development costs for virtual patients are high, since creation of a single scenario may take up to nine months. In this work, we present a virtual patient platform that reduces development costs. The SIDNIE (Scaffolded Interviews Developed by Nurses in Education) system can adapt a single scenario to multiple levels of learners and supports the selection of multiple learning goals. We have shown that SIDNIE is effective for learning [Dukes et al., 2013]. We designed and evaluated a scenario-builder tool that enables nursing faculty to create their own scenarios for SIDNIE, without the aid of a computer scientist. Additionally, we showed that scenarios created using this system could be effective for teaching nursing students verbal communication skills by conducting a user study with freshman nursing students

Instruction based on computer simulations

Excerpts available at Google Books. For integral text, see publisher's website : http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415804615/"Introduction : In the scientific debate on what is the best approach to teaching and learning, a recurring question concerns who should lead the learning process, the teacher or the learner (see e.g., Tobias & Duffy, 2009) ? Poistions takens vary from a preference for direct, expository, teacher-led instruction (Kirschner, Sweller, & Clark, 2006) to fully open student-centered approaches that can be called pure discovery methods (e.g., Papert, 1980), with intermediate positions represented by more or less guided discovery methods (e.g., Mayer, 2004). This discussion also is a recurring theme in this chapter." (http://books.google.fr/books?id=cCD_thHjuxEC&pg=PA446&lpg=PA446&dq=Instruction+based+on+computer+simulations+de+jong&source=bl&ots=tOJ7FdkZow&sig=s8W6OnyU3H7iRLm7wqISfu6CAYE&hl=fr&ei=AZGATviHDMuV0QXewI3KCQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CDoQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=Instruction%20based%20on%20computer%20simulations%20de%20jong&f=false