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In spring of 2020, almost all campuses across the United States abruptly closed and shifted to remote instruction due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Students and faculty rapidly adjusted how they engaged in learning in a time of great social and economic upheaval. In this paper, we use the lens of equity-oriented student engagement to examine how computing departments facilitated student participation in educationally engaging activities during the campus closures. The National Science Foundation-funded INCLUDES Alliance, the Computing Alliance of Hispanic-Serving Institutions (CAHSI), is a network of computing departments dedicated to increasing the representation of Hispanics in computing education and careers. We present results from a survey administered in spring 2020 to over 900 CAHSI students in 14 computing departments at Hispanic-Serving Institutions and interviews with 30 faculty, department chairs, and leaders. Though students reported increased financial and mental health struggles, they reflected on the myriad ways that faculty and peers supported their learning and sustained their engagement in coursework and co-curricular opportunities. In response to the pandemic, faculty and student leaders structured supports, such as peer-led team learning sessions and student clubs, to operate effectively in remote environments to promote student engagement.
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Increasing students’ social engagement during COVID-19 with Net.Create: collaborative social network analysis to map historical pandemics during a pandemic
Purpose The authors explored shifts in social interactions, content engagement and history learning as students who were studying one pandemic simultaneously experienced another. This paper aims to understand how the Net.Create network visualization tool would support students as they tried to understand the many complex interactions in a historical text in a remote learning environment and how sustained knowledge building using Net.Create would shape student attitudes toward remote learning, collaboration and engagement. Design/methodology/approach This paper explores changes in engagement and learning in a survey-level history course on the black death after a shift to remote learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. The authors used activity theory to focus the adaptation of Net.Create, a web-based collaborative social-network-analysis tool and to understand how it supported group-based remote learning. The authors describe how the redesigned activities sustained engagement with historical content and report coded student network entries, reading responses and surveys to illustrate changes in engagement and learning. Findings The results suggest that students benefit from personal connections to historical content and their peers. Net.Create supported both through collaborative knowledge-building activities and reflection on how their quarantine experiences compared to the historical content they read. It is possible to avoid student frustrations with traditional “group work” even in a remote environment by supporting collaborative learning using Net.Create and a mix of individual and group contributions. Originality/value This is the first use of a collaborative network visualization tool to support large classroom interaction and engagement with history content at the undergraduate level.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1848655
- PAR ID:
- 10179849
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Information and Learning Sciences
- Volume:
- ahead-of-print
- Issue:
- ahead-of-print
- ISSN:
- 2398-5348
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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de Vries, Erica; Hod, Yotam; Ahn, June (Ed.)This study analyzes the implementation of Net.Create, a collaborative network analysis tool (Craig & Danish, 2018), in the context of a digital humanities classroom. Undergraduate students used network analysis to investigate historical objects gathered from the local community in a History Harvest. This paper focuses on the collaborative engagement of groups as they co-constructed conceptual frameworks in Net.Create to explain the individual, social, and cultural histories attached to these objects. Findings suggest that positive social engagement and metacognitive behaviors can support students’ sustained engagement with historical and network analysis ideas. Interwoven personal-oriented and class-oriented social engagement in the data suggest that these forms of engagement can productively sustain engagement with cognitively demanding activities. Having built a supportive environment for collaboration amongst themselves, students were able to smoothly and effectively build on each other’s ideas to generate an understanding of historical and network analysis patterns.more » « less
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Understanding the thought processes of students as they progress from initial (incorrect) answers toward correct answers is a challenge for instructors, both in this pandemic and beyond. This paper presents a general network visualization learning analytics system that helps instructors to view a sequence of answers input by students in a way that makes student learning progressions apparent. The system allows instructors to study individual and group learning at various levels of granularity. The paper illustrates how the visualization system is employed to analyze student responses collected through an intervention. The intervention is BeginToReason, an online tool that helps students learn and use symbolic reasoning-reasoning about code behavior through abstract values instead of concrete inputs. The specific focus is analysis of tool-collected student responses as they perform reasoning activities on code involving conditional statements. Student learning is analyzed using the visualization system and a post-test. Visual analytics highlights include instances where students producing one set of incorrect answers initially perform better than a different set and instances where student thought processes do not cluster well. Post-test data analysis provides a measure of student ability to apply what they have learned and their holistic understanding.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1108/ILS-04-2020-0105
