Title: Coordinating scaffolds for collaborative inquiry in a game‐based learning environment
Abstract
Collaborative inquiry learning affords educators a context within which to support understanding of scientific practices, disciplinary core ideas, and crosscutting concepts. One approach to supporting collaborative science inquiry is through problem‐based learning (PBL). However, there are two key challenges in scaffolding collaborative inquiry learning in technology rich environments. First, it is unclear how we might understand the impact of scaffolds that address multiple functions (e.g., to support inquiry and argumentation). Second, scaffolds take different forms, further complicating how to coordinate the forms and functions of scaffolds to support effective collaborative inquiry. To address these issues, we identify two functions that needed to be scaffolded, the PBL inquiry cycle and accountable talk. We then designed predefined hard scaffolds and just‐in‐time soft scaffolds that target the regulation of collaborative inquiry processes and accountable talk. Drawing on a mixed method approach, we examine how middle school students from a rural school engaged with Crystal Island: EcoJourneys for two weeks (N=45). Findings indicate that hard scaffolds targeting the PBL inquiry process and soft scaffolds that targeted accountable talk fostered engagement in these processes. Although the one‐to‐one mapping between form and function generated positive results, additional soft scaffolds were also needed for effective engagement in collaborative inquiry and that these soft scaffolds were often contingent on hard scaffolds. Our findings have implications for how we might design the form of scaffolds across multiple functions in game‐based learning environments.
Saleh, Asmalina; Phillips, Tanner M.; Hmelo‐Silver, Cindy E.; Glazewski, Krista D.; Mott, Bradford W.; Lester, James C.(
, British Journal of Educational Technology)
Abstract
This exploratory paper highlights how problem‐based learning (PBL) provided the pedagogical framework used to design and interpret learning analytics from Crystal Island: EcoJourneys, a collaborative game‐based learning environment centred on supporting science inquiry. In Crystal Island: EcoJourneys, students work in teams of four, investigate the problem individually and then utilize a brainstorming board, an in‐game PBL whiteboard that structured the collaborative inquiry process. The paper addresses a central question: how can PBL support the interpretation of the observed patterns in individual actions and collaborative interactions in the collaborative game‐based learning environment? Drawing on a mixed method approach, we first analyzed students' pre‐ and post‐test results to determine if there were learning gains. We then used principal component analysis (PCA) to describe the patterns in game interaction data and clustered students based on the PCA. Based on the pre‐ and post‐test results and PCA clusters, we used interaction analysis to understand how collaborative interactions unfolded across selected groups. Results showed that students learned the targeted content after engaging with the game‐based learning environment. Clusters based on the PCA revealed four main ways of engaging in the game‐based learning environment: students engaged in low to moderate self‐directed actions with (1) high and (2) moderate collaborative sense‐making actions, (3) low self‐directed with low collaborative sense‐making actions and (4) high self‐directed actions with low collaborative sense‐making actions. Qualitative interaction analysis revealed that a key difference among four groups in each cluster was the nature of verbal student discourse: students in the low to moderate self‐directed and high collaborative sense‐making cluster actively initiated discussions and integrated information they learned to the problem, whereas students in the other clusters required more support. These findings have implications for designing adaptive support that responds to students' interactions with in‐game activities.
Practitioner notes
What is already known about this topic
Learning analytic methods have been effective for understanding student learning interactions for the purposes of assessment, profiling student behaviour and the effectiveness of interventions.
However, the interpretation of analytics from these diverse data sets are not always grounded in theory and challenges of interpreting student data are further compounded in collaborative inquiry settings, where students work in groups to solve a problem.
What this paper adds
Problem‐based learning as a pedagogical framework allowed for the design to focus on individual and collaborative actions in a game‐based learning environment and, in turn, informed the interpretation of game‐based analytics as it relates to student's self‐directed learning in their individual investigations and collaborative inquiry discussions.
The combination of principal component analysis and qualitative interaction analysis was critical in understanding the nuances of student collaborative inquiry.
Implications for practice and/or policy
Self‐directed actions in individual investigations are critical steps to collaborative inquiry. However, students may need to be encouraged to engage in these actions.
Clustering student data can inform which scaffolds can be delivered to support both self‐directed learning and collaborative inquiry interactions.
All students can engage in knowledge‐integration discourse, but some students may need more direct support from teachers to achieve this.
Simpson, Amber; Knox, Peter N.; Yang, Jing(
, Journal of Engineering Education)
AbstractBackground
Research points to family talk and interactions involving STEM concepts as one of the most influential informal learning experiences that shape an individual's STEM identity development and encourage their pursuit of a STEM career. However, a recent literature review uncovers limited research regarding the development of engineering identity in young children.
Purpose
The purpose of this study was to add to this scant literature by exploring how children position themselves as engineers and how children are positioned as engineers through interactions with parents and other adults within a program focused on family engagement within an engineering design process.
Methods
This study includes two parent–child dyads. We collected and analyzed approximately 19.5 h of video data of the two child–parent dyads interacting with one another throughout an engineering design process as part of an out‐of‐school program.
Results
Results highlight three ways in which the two children enacted various engineering identities through their positioning, negotiation, and acceptance and/or rejection of positionalities as they engaged in an engineering design process with a parent. These identity enactments included (a) possessing knowledge and authority to make decisions regarding the development of their self‐identified engineering problem and prototype; (b) questioning and challenging adult ideas, solutions, and construction of prototypes; and (c) documenting and communicating their thinking regarding the engineering design through sketches and notes.
Conclusions
The significance of this study lies in its potential to change the landscape of those who pursue an engineering career and to contribute to the limited research and ongoing conversations about how to foster environments that support families in creative and collaborative learning specific to the engineering discipline.
Akcil-Okan, O. &(
, 2020 Marvalene Hughes Research in Education Conference)
null
(Ed.)
Recent instructional reforms in science education emphasize rigorous instruction where students’ engage in high-level thinking and sensemaking as they try to explain phenomena or solve problems. This study aims to investigate how students’ intellectual engagement can be promoted through design and implementation of cognitively demanding science tasks. Specifically, we aim to unpack instructional practices that can help to enhance students’ engagement in high-level thinking and sensemaking as they work in science classrooms. In our analysis, we focused on the implementation of five lessons across three different science classrooms that two middle school science teachers collaboratively designed as a part of a professional development about promoting productive student talk in science classrooms. Our analysis revealed the changes in students’ intellectual engagement across the trajectory of these lessons and three instructional practices associated with enhancing opportunities for students’ thinking: (a) Holding students intellectually accountable to develop explanations of how and why a phenomenon occurs through collaborative work, (b) Leveraging students’ ideas to advance their thinking, (c) Initiating just-in-time resources and questions to problematize students’ intellectual engagement. The study findings provide implications for how to generate opportunities to enhance students’ thinking in the service of sensemaking.
Akcil-Okan, O. &(
, National Association for Research in Science Teaching Annual Meeting 2021)
null
(Ed.)
Recent instructional reforms in science education emphasize rigorous instruction where students’ engage in high-level thinking and sensemaking as they try to explain phenomena or solve problems. This study aims to investigate how students’ intellectual engagement can be promoted through design and implementation of cognitively demanding science tasks. Specifically, we aim to unpack instructional practices that can help to enhance students’ engagement in high-level thinking and sensemaking as they work in science classrooms. In our analysis, we focused on the implementation of five lessons across three different science classrooms that two middle school science teachers collaboratively designed as a part of a professional development about promoting productive student talk in science classrooms. Our analysis revealed the changes in students’ intellectual engagement across the trajectory of these lessons and three instructional practices associated with enhancing opportunities for students’ thinking: (a) Holding students intellectually accountable to develop explanations of how and why a phenomenon occurs through collaborative work, (b) Leveraging students’ ideas to advance their thinking, (c) Initiating just-in-time resources and questions to problematize students’ intellectual engagement. The study findings provide implications for how to generate opportunities to enhance students’ thinking in the service of sensemaking.
In June 2020, at the annual conference of the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE), which was held entirely online due to the impacts of COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2), engineering education researchers and social justice scholars diagnosed the spread of two diseases in the United States: COVID-19 and racism. During a virtual workshop (T614A) titled, “Using Power, Privilege, and Intersectionality as Lenses to Understand our Experiences and Begin to Disrupt and Dismantle Oppressive Structures Within Academia,” Drs. Nadia Kellam, Vanessa Svihla, Donna Riley, Alice Pawley, Kelly Cross, Susannah Davis, and Jay Pembridge presented what we might call a pathological analysis of institutionalized racism and various other “isms.” In order to address the intersecting impacts of this double pandemic, they prescribed counter practices and protocols of anti-racism, and strategies against other oppressive “isms” in academia. At the beginning of the virtual workshop, the presenters were pleasantly surprised to see that they had around a hundred attendees. Did the online format of the ASEE conference afford broader exposure of the workshop? Did recent uprising of Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests across the country, and internationally, generate broader interest in their topic?
Whatever the case, at a time when an in-person conference could not be convened without compromising public health safety, ASEE’s virtual conference platform, furnished by Pathable and supplemented by Zoom, made possible the broader social impacts of Dr. Svihla’s land acknowledgement of the unceded Indigenous lands from which she was presenting. Svihla attempted to go beyond a hollow gesture by including a hyperlink in her slides to a COVID-19 relief fund for the Navajo Nation, and encouraged attendees to make a donation as they copied and pasted the link in the Zoom Chat. Dr. Cross’s statement that you are either a racist or an anti-racist at this point also promised broader social impacts in the context of the virtual workshop. You could feel the intensity of the BLM social movements and the broader political climate in the tone of the presenters’ voices. The mobilizing masses on the streets resonated with a cutting-edge of social justice research and education at the ASEE virtual conference. COVID-19 has both exacerbated and made more obvious the unevenness and inequities in our educational practices, processes, and infrastructures.
This paper is an extension of a broader collaborative research project that accounts for how an exceptional group of engineering educators have taken this opportunity to socially broaden their curricula to include not just public health matters, but also contemporary political and social movements. Engineering educators for change and advocates for social justice quickly recognized the affordances of diverse forms of digital technologies, and the possibilities of broadening their impact through educational practices and infrastructures of inclusion, openness, and accessibility. They are makers of what Gary Downy calls “scalable scholarship”—projects in support of marginalized epistemologies that can be scaled up from ideation to practice in ways that unsettle and displace the dominant epistemological paradigm of engineering education.[1] This paper is a work in progress. It marks the beginning of a much lengthier project that documents the key positionality of engineering educators for change, and how they are socially situated in places where they can connect social movements with industrial transitions, and participate in the production of “undone sciences” that address “a structured absence that emerges from relations of inequality.”[2]
In this paper, we offer a brief glimpse into ethnographic data we collected virtually through interviews, participant observation, and digital archiving from March 2019 to August 2019, during the initial impacts of COVID-19 in the United States. The collaborative research that undergirds this paper is ongoing, and what is presented here is a rough and early articulation of ideas and research findings that have begun to emerge through our engagement with engineering educators for change. This paper begins by introducing an image concept that will guide our analysis of how, in this historical moment, forms of social and racial justice are finding their way into the practices of engineering educators through slight changes in pedagogical techniques in response the debilitating impacts of the pandemic. Conceptually, we are interested in how small and subtle changes in learning conditions can socially broaden the impact of engineering educators for change. After introducing the image concept that guides this work, we will briefly discuss methodology and offer background information about the project. Next, we discuss literature that revolves around the question, what is engineering education for? Finally, we introduce the notion of situating engineering education and give readers a brief glimpse into our ethnographic data. The conclusion will indicate future directions for writing, research, and intervention.
Saleh, Asmalina, Yuxin, Chen, Hmelo‐Silver, Cindy E., Glazewski, Krista D., Mott, Bradford W., and Lester, James C. Coordinating scaffolds for collaborative inquiry in a game‐based learning environment. Journal of Research in Science Teaching 57.9 Web. doi:10.1002/tea.21656.
Saleh, Asmalina, Yuxin, Chen, Hmelo‐Silver, Cindy E., Glazewski, Krista D., Mott, Bradford W., & Lester, James C. Coordinating scaffolds for collaborative inquiry in a game‐based learning environment. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 57 (9). https://doi.org/10.1002/tea.21656
Saleh, Asmalina, Yuxin, Chen, Hmelo‐Silver, Cindy E., Glazewski, Krista D., Mott, Bradford W., and Lester, James C.
"Coordinating scaffolds for collaborative inquiry in a game‐based learning environment". Journal of Research in Science Teaching 57 (9). Country unknown/Code not available: Wiley Blackwell (John Wiley & Sons). https://doi.org/10.1002/tea.21656.https://par.nsf.gov/biblio/10455872.
@article{osti_10455872,
place = {Country unknown/Code not available},
title = {Coordinating scaffolds for collaborative inquiry in a game‐based learning environment},
url = {https://par.nsf.gov/biblio/10455872},
DOI = {10.1002/tea.21656},
abstractNote = {Abstract Collaborative inquiry learning affords educators a context within which to support understanding of scientific practices, disciplinary core ideas, and crosscutting concepts. One approach to supporting collaborative science inquiry is through problem‐based learning (PBL). However, there are two key challenges in scaffolding collaborative inquiry learning in technology rich environments. First, it is unclear how we might understand the impact of scaffolds that address multiple functions (e.g., to support inquiry and argumentation). Second, scaffolds take different forms, further complicating how to coordinate the forms and functions of scaffolds to support effective collaborative inquiry. To address these issues, we identify two functions that needed to be scaffolded, the PBL inquiry cycle and accountable talk. We then designed predefined hard scaffolds and just‐in‐time soft scaffolds that target the regulation of collaborative inquiry processes and accountable talk. Drawing on a mixed method approach, we examine how middle school students from a rural school engaged with Crystal Island: EcoJourneys for two weeks (N=45). Findings indicate that hard scaffolds targeting the PBL inquiry process and soft scaffolds that targeted accountable talk fostered engagement in these processes. Although the one‐to‐one mapping between form and function generated positive results, additional soft scaffolds were also needed for effective engagement in collaborative inquiry and that these soft scaffolds were often contingent on hard scaffolds. Our findings have implications for how we might design the form of scaffolds across multiple functions in game‐based learning environments.},
journal = {Journal of Research in Science Teaching},
volume = {57},
number = {9},
publisher = {Wiley Blackwell (John Wiley & Sons)},
author = {Saleh, Asmalina and Yuxin, Chen and Hmelo‐Silver, Cindy E. and Glazewski, Krista D. and Mott, Bradford W. and Lester, James C.},
}
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