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1. Student views of what counts as doing physics in the lab

   https://doi.org/10.1119/perc.2022.pr.Stump  

   Stump, Emily M.; Holmes, N. G. (September 2022, 2022 Physics Education Research Conference Proceedings)

   Frank, Brian W.; Jones, Dyan L.; Ryan, and Qing (Ed.)

   Numerous studies have identified gender inequity in how students divide roles in lab courses. Few studies, however, have probed how these inequities impact women's experimental physics identity development. In this work, we used closed-response surveys to investigate which lab tasks students view as part of "doing physics" and how these designations varied by gender. In both courses, we found that most students viewed working with the experimental apparatus, taking lab notes, doing data analysis, and thinking about the physics theory behind the experiment as part of doing physics. Only 50% of students, however, viewed managing the group progress as part of doing physics. While men and women's views did not vary in the first-semester lab course, in the third-semester course women were more likely to view notes and managing as part of doing physics than were men. Given that previous research has indicated that women are more likely to take on managing and note-taking roles than men, our results suggest that women may be receiving less recognition as physicists from their peers, which may hinder their experimental physics identity development. 

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2. Not a Team but Learning as One: The Impact of Consistent Attendance on Discourse Diversification in Math Group Modeling

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3627043.3659554  

   Abdelshiheed, Mark; Jacobs, Jennifer; D'Mello, Sidney (June 2024, ACM)

   This work investigates relationships between consistent attendance —attendance rates in a group that maintains the same tutor and students across the school year— and learning in small group tutoring sessions. We analyzed data from two large urban districts consisting of 206 9th-grade student groups (3 − 6 students per group) for a total of 803 students and 75 tutors. The students attended small group tutorials approximately every other day during the school year and completed a pre and post-assessment of math skills at the start and end of the year, respectively. First, we found that the attendance rates of the group predicted individual assessment scores better than the individual attendance rates of students comprising that group. Second, we found that groups with high consistent attendance had more frequent and diverse tutor and student talk centering around rich mathematical discussions. Whereas we emphasize that changing tutors or groups might be necessary, our findings suggest that consistently attending tutorial sessions as a group with the same tutor might lead the group to implicitly learn as a team despite not being one. 

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3. Characterising Individual-Level Collaborative Learning Behaviours Using Ordered Network Analysis and Wearable Sensors

   Yan, L; Swiecki, Z; Gašević, D; Zhao; L; Li, X; Martinez-Maldonado; R; Tan; Y; et al (October 2023, Springer, Cham)

   Irgens, G; Knight, S (Ed.)

   Wearable positioning sensors are enabling unprecedented opportunities to model students’ procedural and social behaviours during collaborative learning tasks in physical learning spaces. Emerging work in this area has mainly focused on modelling group-level interactions from low-level x-y positioning data. Yet, little work has utilised such data to automatically identify individual-level differences among students working in co-located groups in terms of procedural and social aspects such as task prioritisation and collaboration dynamics, respectively. To address this gap, this study characterised key differences among 124 students’ procedural and social behaviours according to their perceived stress, collaboration, and task satisfaction during a complex group task using wearable positioning sensors and ordered networked analysis. The results revealed that students who demonstrated more collaborative behaviours were associated with lower stress and higher collaboration satisfaction. Interestingly, students who worked individually on the primary and secondary learning tasks reported lower and higher task satisfaction, respectively. These findings can deepen our understanding of students’ individual-level behaviours and experiences while learning in groups. 

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4. Student Behaviors and Interactions Influence Group Discussions in an Introductory Biology Lab Setting

   https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.20-03-0054  

   Paine, Alex R.; Knight, Jennifer K. (December 2020, CBE—Life Sciences Education)

   Gardner, Grant Ean (Ed.)

   Past research on group work has primarily focused on promoting change through implementation of interventions designed to increase performance. Recently, however, education researchers have called for more descriptive analyses of group interactions. Through detailed qualitative analysis of recorded discussions, we studied the natural interactions of students during group work in the context of a biology laboratory course. We analyzed multiple interactions of 30 different groups as well as data from each of the 91 individual participants to characterize the ways students engage in discussion and how group dynamics promote or prevent meaningful discussion. Using a set of codes describing 15 unique behaviors, we determined that the most common behavior seen in student dialogue was analyzing data, followed by recalling information and repeating ideas. We also classified students into one of 10 different roles for each discussion, determined by their most common behaviors. We found that, although students cooperated with one another by exchanging information, they less frequently fully collaborated to explain their conclusions through the exchange of reasoning. Within this context, these findings show that students working in groups generally choose specific roles during discussions and focus on data analysis rather than constructing logical reasoning chains to explain their conclusions. 

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5. Board 208: Achieving Active Learning through Collaborative Online Lab Experiences

   https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--42620  

   Yoo, Julia; Sayil, Selahattin; Tcheslavski, Gleb (June 2023, ASEE Conferences)

   In engineering education, laboratory learning that is well aligned with core content knowledge is instrumental as it plays a significant role in students’ knowledge construction, application, and distribution. Learning in laboratories is interactive in nature, and therefore students who learn engineering through online platforms can face many challenges with labs, which were frequently documented during the recent pandemic. To address those reported challenges, innovative online lab learning modules were developed and learning strategies were implemented in five courses in electrical engineering, Circuits I, Electronics I, Electronics II, Signals and Systems, and Microcomputers I, through which students gain solid foundation before students take on senior design projects. Lab modules with open-ended design learning experience through using a lab-in-a-box approach were developed to allow students to solve lab problems with multiple approaches that allow problem solving independently and collaboratively. Because this innovative lab design allows problem solving at various cognitive levels, it is better suited for concept exploration and collaborative lab learning environments as opposed to the traditional lab works with a “cookbook” approach that tend to lead students to follow certain procedures for expected solutions with the absence of problem exploration stage. In addition to the open-ended lab modules, course instructors formed online lab groups through which students shared the entire problem-solving process from ideas formation to solutions through trial and error. To investigate the effectiveness of the open-ended online lab learning experiences, students in all courses were randomly divided into experimental and control groups. Students in the control group learned in labs through learning materials that are aligned with core concepts by following a completed given procedures students in the experimental group learned through inquiry-based labs learning materials that required them to work in teams by integrating core concepts together to find solutions with multiple approaches. To maximize the online lab learning effect and to replicate the way industry, commerce and research practice, instructor structured cooperative learning strategies were applied along with pre-lab simulations and videos. The research results showed that generally students in the experimental group outperformed their counterparts in labs especially with more advanced concept understanding and applications, but showed mixed results for the overall class performance based on their course learning outcomes such as quizzes, lab reports, and tests. Further, survey results showed that 72% of students reported open-ended lab learning helped them learn better. According to interviews, the initial stage of working with team members was somewhat challenging from difficulties in finding time to work together for discussion and problem solving. Yet, through many communication tools, such as course LMS and mobile apps they were able to collaborate in lab problems, which also led them to build learning communities that went beyond the courses. 

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