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1. Exploring social and cognitive engagement in small groups through a community of learners (CoL) lens

   https://doi.org/10.1039/d3rp00071k  

   Nennig, Hannah T.; States, Nicole E.; Macrie-Shuck, Michael; Fateh, Shaghayegh; Gunes, Zubeyde Demet; Cole, Renee; Rushton, Gregory T.; Shah, Lisa; Talanquer, Vicente (July 2023, Chemistry Education Research and Practice)

   A variety of research studies reveal the advantages of actively engaging students in the learning process through collaborative work in the classroom. However, the complex nature of the learning environment in large college general chemistry courses makes it challenging to identify the different factors that affect students’ cognitive and social engagement while working on in-class tasks. To provide insights into this area, we took a closer look at students’ conversations during in-class activities to characterize typical discourse patterns and expressed chemical thinking in representative student groups in samples collected in five different learning environments across four universities. For this purpose, we adapted and applied a ‘Community of Learners’ (CoL) theoretical perspective to characterize group activity through the analysis of student discourse. Within a CoL perspective, the extent to which a group functions as a community of learners is analyzed along five dimensions including Community of Discourse (CoD), Legitimization of Differences (LoD), Building on Ideas (BoI), Reflective Learning (RL), and Community of Practice (CoP). Our findings make explicit the complexity of analyzing student engagement in large active learning environments where a multitude of variables can affect group work. These include, among others, group size and composition, the cognitive level of the tasks, the types of cognitive processes used to complete tasks, and the motivation and willingness of students to substantively engage in disciplinary reasoning. Our results point to important considerations in the design and implementation of active learning environments that engage more students with chemical ideas at higher levels of reasoning. 

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2. Creating Meaningful Learning Opportunities through Incorporating Local Research into Chemistry Classroom Activities

   https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci13020192  

   States, Nicole; Stone, Elizabeth; Cole, Renee (February 2023, Education Sciences)

   Incorporating real-life context through connections to research early in the curriculum can create meaningful learning opportunities that encourage students to engage deeply with classroom content to construct chemistry knowledge. Course-based undergraduate research experiences have been successful at integrating real-life context, but are often only incorporated into upper-level courses. To provide an additional pathway to foster interaction with research, four activities from an introductory chemistry discussion class were created to incorporate authentic research connections. Care was taken to incorporate metacognitive questions designed to help students make connections between their preexisting knowledge and course content. Marzano’s taxonomy was used to analyze the cognitive complexity of tasks, which increased in the revised activities, allowing for more opportunities for knowledge construction. Audio and written work of student groups as they worked through activities was collected. Qualitative analysis of student engagement revealed that control over the content of activities to incorporate opportunities for knowledge construction is not enough to facilitate students consciously engaging in meaningful learning. If instructors wish to promote students integrating chemistry knowledge into their existing framework, course instructors, including graduate teaching assistants, need to be trained on how to properly facilitate classroom experiences to increase the likelihood of success. 

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3. Exploring the Relationships Among Middle School Students’ Peer Interactions, Task Efficiency, and Learning Engagement in Game-Based Learning

   https://doi.org/10.1177/1046878120907940  

   Moon, Jewoong; Ke, Fengfeng (March 2020, Simulation & Gaming)

   Background. Middle school students’ math anxiety and low engagement have been major issues in math education. In order to reduce their anxiety and support their math learning, game-based learning (GBL) has been implemented. GBL research has underscored the role of social dynamics to facilitate a qualitative understanding of students’ knowledge. Whereas students’ peer interactions have been deemed a social dynamic, the relationships among peer interaction, task efficiency, and learning engagement were not well understood in previous empirical studies. Method. This mixed-method research implemented E-Rebuild, which is a 3D architecture game designed to promote students’ math problem-solving skills. We collected a total of 102 50-minutes gameplay sessions performed by 32 middle school students. Using video-captured and screen-recorded gameplaying sessions, we implemented behavior observations to measure students’ peer interaction efficiency, task efficiency, and learning engagement. We used association analyses, sequential analysis, and thematic analysis to explain how peer interaction promoted students’ task efficiency and learning engagement. Results. Students’ peer interactions were negatively related to task efficiency and learning engagement. There were also different gameplay patterns by students’ learning/task-relevant peer-interaction efficiency (PIE) level. Students in the low PIE group tended to progress through game tasks more efficiently than those in the high PIE group. The results of qualitative thematic analysis suggested that the students in the low PIE group showed more reflections on game-based mathematical problem solving, whereas those with high PIE experienced distractions during gameplay. Discussion. This study confirmed that students’ peer interactions without purposeful and knowledge-constructive collaborations led to their low task efficiency, as well as low learning engagement. The study finding shows further design implications: (1) providing in-game prompts to stimulate students’ math-related discussions and (2) developing collaboration contexts that legitimize students’ interpersonal knowledge exchanges with peers. 

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4. Dysgu: A Tool to Keep Students Engaged Outside the Classroom

   https://doi.org/10.1109/TALE48000.2019.9225894  

   Fuad, Muztaba (December 2019, 2019 IEEE International Conference on Engineering, Technology and Education (TALE))

   This paper presents an out-of-class active learning environment, called Dysgu. Dysgu presents an innovative approach to out-of-class activities by combining multiple dimensions of best practices from different spectrum of student learning into a coherent idea and delivering such activities with personalization and adaptation. The goal of the Dysgu system is to study the impact of frequent out-of-class activities on student learning and engagement when the students can compare their progress with the rest of the class and where the activities are smaller (in scope) with scaffolding support, are interactive in nature, and delivered via a mobile platform. Initial usability tests and software engineering quality matrices show that the software is easy to use, manage and extend. 

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5. Active Learning for Out-of-Class Activities by Using Interactive Mobile Apps

   https://doi.org/10.1109/LaTICE.2018.00008  

   Fuad, Muztaba; Akbar, Monika; Zubov, Lynn (April 2018, 2018 International Conference on Learning and Teaching in Computing and Engineering (LaTICE))

   Keeping students engaged with the course content outside the classroom is a challenging task. Since learning during undergraduate years occurs not only as student engagement in class, but also during out-of-class activities, we need to redesign and reinvent such activities for this and future generation of students. Although active learning has been used widely to improve in-class student learning and engagement, its usage outside the classroom is not widespread and researched. Active learning is often not utilized for out-of-class activities and traditional unsupervised activities are used mostly to keep students engaged in the content after they leave the classroom. Although there has been tremendous research performed to improve student learning and engagement in the classroom, there are a few pieces of researches on improving out-of-class learning and student engagement. This poster will present an approach to redesign the traditional out-of-class activities with the help of mobile apps, which are interactive and adaptive, and will provide personalization to satisfy student's needs outside the classroom so that optimal learning experience can be achieved. 

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