The Picture of Smartphones at School is Not a Dire One and the Picture of Student Competence is a Bright One

In the United States, where I am based, one would get the impression that smartphones are a dangerous drug. Adults worry about smartphone addiction, the correlation of depression with smartphone usage, and an excess amount of screen time (e.g., Elhai, Levine, Dvorak, & Hall, 2016; Duke & Montag, 2017; Škařupová, Ólafsson, & Blinka, 2017). News headlines appear about technology moguls who will not allow their own children to have their own mobile device despite they themselves being the leaders in smartphone products and services. This then evokes guilt and causes anxiety for all the other American adults who are not multimillionaires from the tech industry yet allow their own children to use mobile devices. These alarmist headlines appear in regard to smartphone use in discretionary time. One could imagine the fear and angst that might result from headlines about research on permitted mobile phone use in the classroom. Fortunately, various researchers from Nordic countries have done some of that research and provided empirically grounded arguments for what happens when smartphones are actually used in classrooms. They did so across two countries and with clever instrumentation that could capture what students were seeing on their phones in a way that gave options for students to choose what not to disclose to the research team. Americans can breathe a sigh of relief and look to this special issue for signs of what happens

Personal Analytics Explorations to Support Youth Learning

While personalized learning environments often include systems that automatically adapt to inferred learner needs, other forms of personalized learning exist. One form involves the use of personal analytics in which the learner obtains and analyzes data about himself/herself. More known in informatics communities, there is potential for use of personal analytics for design of instruction. This chapter provides two cases of personal analytics learning explorations to demonstrate their range and potential. One case is of a high school student examining how sleep influences her mood. The other case is of a sixth-grade class of students examining how deviations from typical walking behavior change distributional shape in plotted step data. Both cases show how social support and direct experience with data correction are intimately involved in how youth can learn through personal analytics activities

Misconstruals or more? The interactions of orbit diagrams and explanations of the seasons

This paper examines a “misconstrual hypothesis” regarding diagrams of the Earth’s orbit around the sun and how middle school students explain the cause of the seasons. Drawing from 24 semi-structured interviews, I present qualitative analyses of students’ explanations of why temperatures vary in summer and winter and how those are influenced by the elliptical shape of perspective drawings of the Earth’s orbit, common to many science textbooks. The results of the analysis suggest that diagram interpretation does not necessarily follow what has been often predicted in the literature and that conceptualizations can shift quite rapidly as different diagram features are noticed. A knowledge-in-pieces approach for understanding diagram interpretation is ultimately recommended through specific examples

Physical Activity Data Use by Technoathletes: Examples of Collection, Inscription, and Identification

The proliferation of physical activity data monitoring devices had led to an increase in technoathletes—individuals who combine athletic training and performance with the collection and evaluation of personally-relevant data in an effort to better understand their own abilities. We interviewed 20 technoathletes who were actively involved within either cycling or running communities. Qualitative vignettes of technoathletic engagement with data and the practice of data logging, in specific, are discussed and illustrated. Individual relationships that technoathletes have with their data are also examined. Through the examples, we highlight some commonalities in the data that were obtained and how various athletes represented that information. We also consider some of the tensions that technoathletes have with respect to the data they can obtain and how they saw themselves in light of their data and consider some implications for instruction

An Exploration of Computational Text Analysis of Co-Design Discourse in a Research-Practice Partnership

In combination with contextualized human interpretation, computational text analysis offers a quantitative approach to interrogating the nature of participation and social positioning in discourse. Using meeting transcript data from the development of a co-design research-practice partnership, we examine the roles and forms of participation that contribute to an effective collaboration between a multileveled school system and researcher partners. We apply computational methods to explore the language of co-design and multi-stakeholder perspectives in support of educational improvement science efforts and our theoretical understanding of partnership roles. Results indicate participation patterns align with documented roles in co- design partnerships and highlight the space dedicated to process reflection, context sharing, and logistical coordination

A Clinical Interview for Assessing Student Learning in a University-Level Craft Technology Course

This paper describes the design and development of a clinical interview protocol, the “Interactive Toy Interview” (ITI), that was used to assess prior knowledge and resultant learning among undergraduate students enrolled in a new, university-level “Craft Technologies” course. This new course involved several weeks of project work with electronic textiles and soft circuits. The ITI draws on prior work assessing learning with e-textiles, such as circuit diagram drawing tasks and ‘debuggems’, but it is based on use of existing commercial toys and objects. We present excerpts from interviews with a student who reported no prior background with sewing, circuitry, or programing and discuss what kinds of progress we see in her thinking about interactive toys as they relate to experiences she had in the Craft Technology course

Whose Responsibility Is It? A Statewide Survey of School Librarians on Responsibilities and Resources for Teaching Digital Citizenship

In 2015 the Utah State Legislature passed H.B. 213, “Safe Technology Utilization and Digital Citizenship in Public Schools,” mandating that K–12 schools provide digital citizenship instruction. This study presents an exploratory endeavor to understand how school librarians in a state that adopted digital citizenship legislation engage with digital citizenship instruction and their perceptions of a school librarian’s role in providing this instruction. We conducted a statewide survey of Utah school librarians, including questions focusing on digital citizenship resources used, current instruction within the school, and inquiries about improvements to current instruction. School librarians expressed a desire to be more involved in the instruction process, the need for more time, and the desire for consistent collaboration with teachers and administration