Educational Technology Design Research Articles

Taking data feminism to school: A synthesis and review of pre‐collegiate data science education projects

AbstractAs the field of K‐12 data science education continues to take form, humanistic approaches to teaching and learning about data are needed. Data feminism is an approach that draws on feminist scholarship and action to humanize data and contend with the relationships between data and power. In this review paper, we draw on principles from data feminism to review 42 different educational research and design approaches that engage youth with data, many of which are educational technology intensive and bear on future data‐intensive educational technology research and design projects. We describe how the projects engage students with examining power, challenging power, elevating emotion and lived experience, rethinking binaries and hierarchies, embracing pluralism, considering context, and making labour visible. In doing so, we articulate ways that current data education initiatives involve youth in thinking about issues of justice and inclusion. These projects may offer examples of varying complexity for future work to contend with and, ideally, extend in order to further realize data feminism in K‐12 data science education. Practitioner notesWhat is already known about this topic Data feminism is an emergent framework for changing data practices and discourse in service of equity and justice. Data science education is rapidly growing as a topic of interest in the educational technology research and design communities. Many educational technology and design projects have been launched and shared in publications that preceded the widespread distribution of the data feminism framework. What this paper adds Data feminism is partially re‐articulated in terms familiar to educational technology research communities. Prior and recent projects are organized with respect to how they illustrate potential connections to core data feminism principles. This paper identifies specific strategies that recent projects have used that have potential for realizing data feminism principles. Implications for practice and/or policy Educational technologists can use the re‐articulated principles of data feminism for education to inform their future design work. Tractable steps to achieve data justice that are attainable within existing educational systems can be pursued. Communities can and should bring together multiple ways of knowing to support new educational practices and futures with data.

The Inclusion of Children on the Autism Spectrum in the Design of Learning Technologies: A Small-Scale Exploration of Adults’ Perspectives

This research explores the inclusion of children on the autism spectrum in the design of educational technology from the perspectives of adult co-designers. A group of five non-verbal children with a diagnosis of autism participated in a series of four design workshops over the course of 6 weeks. Using a participatory design approach, a small team of three teachers and two technology developers worked alongside the children to design a language development and literacy app for use in a special education classroom. The outcome of this process was a stand-alone education app that comprised many of the contributions made by children during the workshops. The inclusion of children with autism in technology design ensures the end-product reflects their education needs and requirements. Using a qualitative approach, this small-scale study sought to examine the participation of children with autism through the various stages of the design process from the perspectives of their teachers and technology designers. Data were collected through individual interviews and a focus group with teachers and technology designers. Three major themes emerged from thematic analysis: (1) valuing contribution; (2) the challenge of listening; and (3) ownership in outcome. Emerging subthemes highlight challenges described by teachers and designers in facilitating and maintaining meaningful participation in design activities and their efforts to address these. Findings emphasise the value of participation while questioning participatory practices for specific phases of design. The study explores the challenges of equalising power between adults and children with autism in participatory design projects. It uncovers tension between the desire to ensure the authentic participation of children with autism where communication and engagement is significantly compromised by the complexity of their disability. The small number of participants and the modest scope of this design project limit the generalisability of the findings. However, it points to the value of recognising children’s contributions and the importance of striving to incorporate these in the final design artefact.

The Importance of Boundary Objects in Industry-Academia Collaborations to Support Evidencing the Efficacy of Educational Technology

The context of a 2.5 year academia-led programme for the educational technology sector in the United Kingdom is used to explore the role of logic models as boundary objects to support the programme objectives. The programme provided educational research training and mentoring to participants from 252 small and medium-sized enterprises to support them with the use of existing and self-generated evidence of the efficacy of their educational technologies. Participants from a deliberate sample of six enterprises were interviewed to elicit their perceptions of the process through which the creation and use of a logic model for their product or service did or did not become a useful tool to support their research and business goals. The results suggest that logic models have vital roles as boundary objects in this context, such as supporting communication, learning, and product development. The study offers a first-case example of how logic models can be used in the design of educational technology, responding to the call for research in this area. A discussion on the challenges associated with the use of the logic model in the context of the project concludes the article.

Manipulating Interface Design Features Affects Children's Stop-And-Think Behaviours in a Counterintuitive-Problem Game

The human–computer interaction (HCI) design of educational technologies influences cognitive behaviour, so it is imperative to assess how different HCI strategies support intended behaviour. We developed a neuroscience-inspired game that trains children's use of “stopping-and-thinking” (S&T)—an inhibitory control-related behaviour—in the context of counterintuitive science problems. We tested the efficacy of four HCI features in supporting S&T: (1) a readiness mechanic, (2) motion cues, (3) colour cues, and (4) rewards/penalties. In a randomised eye-tracking trial with 45 7-to-8-year-olds, we found that the readiness mechanic increased S&T duration, that motion and colour cues proved equally effective at promoting S&T, that combining symbolic colour with the readiness mechanic may have a cumulative effect, and that rewards/penalties may have distracted children from S&T. Additionally, S&T duration was related to in-game performance. Our results underscore the importance of interdisciplinary approaches to educational technology research that actively investigates how HCI impacts intended learning behaviours.

The Pandemic Shift to Remote Learning under Resource Constraints

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced the transition of workflows across sectors to digital platforms. In education settings, stakeholders previously reluctant to integrate computing technology in the classroom now find themselves with little choice but to embrace it. This move to the digital brings additional challenges in underserved contexts with limited, intermittent, and shared access to mobile or computing devices and the internet. In this rapidly evolving digital landscape, we investigate how educational institutions (schools and non-profit organizations) working with underserved populations in India are managing the transition to online or remote learning. We conducted twenty remote interviews with students, teachers, and administrators from underserved contexts across India. We found that online learning efforts in this setting relied on a resilient human infrastructure comprised of students, teachers, parents, administrators, and non-profit organizations to help navigate and overcome the limitations of available technical infrastructure. Our research aims to articulate lessons for educational technology design in the post-COVID period, outlining areas for improvement in the design of online learning platforms in resource-constrained settings, and identifying elements of online learning that could be retained to strengthen the education system overall.

Educational Psychology Is Evolving to Accommodate Technology, Multiple Disciplines, and Twenty-First-Century Skills.

This article covers recent research activities in educational psychology that have an interdisciplinary emphasis and that accommodate twenty-first-century skills in addition to the traditional foundations of literacy, numeracy, science, reasoning (problem-solving), and academic subject matter. We emphasize digital technologies because they are capable of tracking learning data in rich detail and reliably delivering interventions that are tailored to individual learners in particular sociocultural contexts. This is a departure from inflexible pedagogical approaches that previously have been routinely adopted in most classrooms and other contexts of instruction with no precise record of learning and instructional activities. A good design of educational technology embraces the principles of learning science, identifies the basic types of learning that are needed, implements relevant technological affordances, and accommodates feedback from different stakeholders. This article covers research in literacy, collaborative problem-solving, motivation, emotion, and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) areas.

Ameta‐analysison the effects of technology's functions and roles on students' mathematics achievement in K‐12 classrooms

AbstractBackgroundWith the recent pivot to online instruction and/or to mixed online/face‐to‐face (i.e., hybrid) models of teaching necessitated by the novel coronavirus pandemic, the uses of technology to support instruction would seem to have great importance. Whereas effective integration of technology in mathematics classrooms requires recognition of students’ needs and instructional goals that technology could fulfill, very few comprehensive meta‐analytical studies have focused on the roles of instructional technology in support of specific learning goals.ObjectivesIn this meta‐analysis, we investigated and reviewed the roles and affordances of technology in mathematics instruction and its effects on students' mathematics achievement.MethodsCross‐searching multiple bibliographic databases generated a total of 3276 potentially relevant full‐text studies. After applying a series of inclusion/exclusion criteria, we kept 77 studies with 151 effect sizes. Two researchers then coded for seven sets of study features and student characteristics: technology roles, publication‐related features (years and resources), research design, sample size, grade levels, duration of interventions, and types of the testing instruments. The coding achieved acceptable levels of inter‐rater reliabilities. Since effect sizes varied across studies and student populations, random‐effects models were used for overall effect estimates and moderator analyses.Results and conclusionsOverall, this meta‐analysis revealed a small, positive, and statistically significant effect of technology on students' mathematics achievement with an average Hedges' s g (ḡ) of 0.23. The largest significant moderator effects were found when technology was used to design and support collaborative and communicative environments (ḡ= 0.49); the next‐largest moderator effects were found when using technology as supports for problem‐solving (ḡ= 0.39), followed by the roles of as supports for conceptual development (ḡ= 0.31) and as adaptive mathematics practices (ḡ= 0.28). This study also found that the effects of technology were differentiated as a function of publication resources, research design, duration of intervention, and the testing instrument.Major takeawaysFocusing on the roles and functions of technology, this study can contribute to guide potential synthetical studies as well as the future design of educational technology. In particular, technology is used effectively when it is used (a) to create and design a collaborative and communicative learning environment where students have chances to collaborate and interact with each other and (b) as supports for mathematics problem‐solving and for mathematics conceptual development. On the other hand, technology is less effective when it is used for monitoring and assessing students' learning processes without follow‐up instructions.The findings suggested that technology intervention lasting for a shorter time is the better choice. When technology is used for longer periods of instruction, maintaining its novelty and students’ curiosity should be considered. This study also suggested that incorporating computer‐adaptive testing in technology‐based intervention programs is more likely to detect technology effects as adaptive testing could continuously adjust to the abilities of individual students.

What future for digital homework: Literature review

Digital homework today is an observable fact of school practice, which resulted from the distance learning experience during the COVID-19 pandemic and the development of online platforms that provide EdTech products of this kind. Yet, not enough reflection of this issue has happened so far. The article attempts to summarise recent research on homework to answer the question: what kind of digital homework has the potential to improve teaching and learning? First, the article compares research findings on the effect of homework and homework-related teaching practices to outline deficiencies in three aspects of homework: the quality of homework, the quality of feedback, and autonomy support. Then it demonstrates digital homework variability using the SAMR model. Finally, the author suggests solutions for three named aspects of homework on different levels of the SAMR model. For homework quality, higher levels of technology integration bring new task designs and more complex learning objectives. For feedback quality, it means being able to collect and employ learning data which was impossible earlier. For autonomy support, it makes homework relevant to students’ goals and interests. Recommendations provided might be helpful for the design and development of new educational technologies, as well as for better use of digital homework in teaching practice.

Gab, Parler, and (Mis)educational Technologies: Reconsidering Informal Learning on Social Media Platforms

“Alternative” social media platforms like Parler and Gab—on which hate speech and conspiracy theories often exist unchecked—present an opportunity for instructional designers and other education professionals to revisit assumptions about informal learning on social media. Employing a conceptual framework that distinguishes education from miseducation, we use these controversial platforms to argue that educators should more fully consider: 1) the miseducation happening in learning spaces, 2) how the design of educational technologies may amplify miseducation, and 3) the importance that formal education resist miseducation.

Co-word analysis and academic performance from the Australasian Journal of Educational Technology in Web of Science

Since its inception in 1985, the Australasian Journal of Educational Technology (AJET) has been dedicated to the diffusion of studies on the integration of technology in higher education. Its track record in this field has placed it in the first quartile of the Scimago Journal & Country Rank. The objective of the study was to reveal to the scientific community the journey and evolution that this journal has had throughout its existence in Web of Science. A bibliometric methodology was used, supported by a scientific mapping from a unit of analysis of 798 documents. For this reason, a co-word analysis can be a fundamental tool for understanding the characteristics of their production and their impact on the scientific community. There is an evident progressive evolution of the studies published in the Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, with a first phase focused on the design and implementation of educational technology in learning environments, a second phase focused on the enrichment of technology and its acceptance within the processes of teaching and learning, and finally a stage focused on student and teacher perceptions of the implementation of technology in the educational context.
 Implications for practice or policy:
 
 We have established a contextual framework to show researchers current trends in educational technology and delineate future lines of research.
 Those interested in this subject will have a set of bibliometric indicators to delve into the field of educational technology.
 Higher education teachers and students will discover the evolution of the use of technology in learning spaces.

Embodied geometric reasoning: Dynamic gestures during intuition, insight, and proof.

Grounded and embodied cognition (GEC) serves as a framework to investigate mathematical reasoning for proof (reasoning that is logical, operative, and general), insight (gist), and intuition (snap judgment). Geometry is the branch of mathematics concerned with generalizable properties of shape and space. Mathematics experts (N = 46) and nonexperts (N = 44) were asked to judge the truth and to justify their judgments for four geometry conjectures. Videotaped interviews were transcribed and coded for occurrences of gestures and speech during the proof production process. Analyses provide empirical support for claims that geometry proof production is an embodied activity, even when controlling for math expertise, language use, and spatial ability. Dynamic depictive gestures portray generalizable properties of shape and space through enactment of transformational operations (e.g., dilation, skewing). Occurrence of dynamic depictive gestures and nondynamic depictive gestures are associated with proof performance, insight, and intuition, as hypothesized, over and above contributions of spoken language. Geometry knowledge for proof may be embodied and accessed and revealed through actions and the transformational speech utterances describing these actions. These findings have implications for instruction, assessment of embodied knowledge, and the design of educational technology to facilitate mathematical reasoning by promoting and tracking dynamic gesture production and transformational speech. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved)

BASIC PEDAGOGICAL APPROACHES AND THEIR IMPACT ON THE FORMATION OF EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGIES

The aim of this scientific article is to investigate the concept of "pedagogical approach", its essence and significance for modeling educational technologies. Definitions of personality-oriented, competence, activity, axiological, acmeological, synergetic, differentiated approaches are tackled. We took into account the role and place in the structure of a particular educational technology. It is emphasized that the design of educational technologies mostly considers its main components: content, techniques and methods, forms of learning and tools.

A patterns based approach for the design of educational technologies

ABSTRACT Despite rapid advances, modeling a variety of instructional designs to support variations in teaching and learning during the design of educational technologies is still an open challenge. In this paper, we propose a patterns based approach for the design of educational technologies to address this challenge. This is in contrast with existing literature that focuses either on patterns in education or in software, and not both. The core idea of our approach is to leverage patterns for modeling instructional design knowledge and to connect it with patterns in software architecture. We discuss different categories of patterns in instructional design. We then present the notion of Pattern-Oriented Instructional Design (POID) as a way to model instructional design as a connection of patterns (ProcessPattern, ContentPattern) and integrate it with Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture (POSA) based on fundamental principles in software engineering. We demonstrate our approach through adult literacy case study (287 million learners, 22 Indian Languages and a variety of instructional designs). The results of our approach (both web and mobile versions) are available at http://rice.iiit.ac.in and were transferred to National Literacy Mission Authority of Government of India for further proliferation.

Student engagement with evidence-based supports for literacy on a digital platform

There is a persistent gap between education research and practice, including in the design of educational technology. This study bridges this gap and examines our partnership with a literacy platform to implement evidence-based digital features that support different learner needs. We examined students’ (N = 1857; Grades 1-6) use of these new optional features (e.g., audio supports, text magnification, annotation) when completing assignments online and found that 92% of students tried at least one. Importantly, we also found that students showed greater engagement with harder assignments when they used the features. Use of the support features did not differ by student characteristics such as reading proficiency, special education, or socioeconomic status, suggesting that developing research-informed features could potentially benefit all students when they need extra scaffolding.

Information flow and cognition affect each other: Evidence from digital learning

In the context of learning systems, identifying causal relationships among information presented to the user, their behavior and cognitive effort required/exerted to understand and perform a task is key to building effective learning experiences, and to maintain engagement in learning processes. An unexplored question is whether our interaction with presented information affects our cognitive effort (and behaviour), or vice-versa. We investigate causal relationship between information presented and cognitive effort (and behaviour) in the context of two separate studies (N = 40, N = 98), and study the effect of instruction (active/passive task). We utilize screen-recordings and eye-tracking data to investigate the relationship among these variables. To investigate the causal relationships among the different measurements, we use Granger’s causality. Further, we propose a new method to combine two time-series from multiple participants for detecting causal relationships. Our results indicate that information presentation drives user focus size (behaviour), and that cognitive load (a measure of cognitive effort exerted) drives information presentation. This relationship is also moderated by instruction type and performance-level (high/low). We draw implications for design of educational material and learning technologies.

An ontology based modeling framework for design of educational technologies

Despite rapid progress, most of the educational technologies today lack a strong instructional design knowledge basis leading to questionable quality of instruction. In addition, a major challenge is to customize these educational technologies for a wide range of customizable instructional designs. Ontologies are one of the pertinent mechanisms to represent instructional design in the literature. However, existing approaches do not support modeling of flexible instructional designs. To address this problem, in this paper, we propose an ontology based framework for systematic modeling of different aspects of instructional design knowledge based on domain patterns. As part of the framework, we present ontologies for modeling goals, instructional processes and instructional material. We demonstrate the ontology framework by presenting instances of the ontology for the large scale case study of adult literacy in India (287 million learners spread across 22 Indian Languages), which requires creation of hundreds of similar but varied eLearning Systems based on flexible instructional designs. The implemented framework is available at http://rice.iiit.ac.in and is transferred to National Literacy Mission Authority of Government of India. The proposed framework could be potentially used for modeling instructional design knowledge for school education, vocational skills and beyond.

Educational Technologies in Modern Higher Education Institutions (Analysis of Russian and Foreign Research and Practice)

Introduction.Globalisation, openness to innovation, implementation of digital content, realisation of competency-based approach in modern education generate a consistent tendency towards strengthening of the role of educational technologies (ET) in different types of professional pedagogical activity, reinforcing pertinence of their application at all levels of education. Mastery and efficient use of a wide range of educational technologies have expanded the opportunities for educators to use productively traditional pedagogical and digital information technologies in order to obtain the guaranteed intended (expected) educational outcome. The interest of researchers and practitioners in selection, design, implementation and evaluation of effectiveness of educational technologies in higher educational institutions is evidenced by the increase in the number of publications suggesting various points of view on the use of such technologies within the educational process, in educational communications and in professional and personal development of students. The search for the most effective means of training of the new generation of specialists to achieve academic and technological breakthrough in Russia has increased the significance of systematic scientific information on modern educational technologies used in higher education institutions.Theaimof the current research is to present the results of review and systematisation of research information on theoretical foundations of development and application of educational technologies in Russian and foreign higher educational institutions.Methodology and research methods.Analytical review has been prepared based on systematisation and generalisation of foreign and Russian scientific publications dedicated to the issues of design and use of educational technologies in the higher educational practice. 319 sources published since 2010 and included in Web of Science and Scopus research and citation databases as well as in the Russian Science Citation Index have been analysed. In order to achieve the set objective, authors have used such methods as content analysis, systems analysis, comparative analysis and benchmarking, terminological analysis, context analysis, generalisation and systematisation, analytical grouping, as well as methods of mathematical statistics.Results and scientific novelty.The article contains the results of analysis of Russian and foreign publications based on the following: 1) levels of presentation of research information (theoretical, theoretical and experimental, empirical); 2) attributes and properties of educational technologies; 3) approaches to selection of classification principles of educational technologies; 4) capabilities of educational technologies to shape academic, communicative and professional competency of a specialist; 5) criteria for evaluation of effectiveness of application of ET in the higher educational practice; 6) preparedness of teacher of higher educational institutions to develop and apply educational technologies. It has been established that Russian authors are still more oriented towards describing the characteristics and algorithms of predominantly traditional educational technologies and their applicability, evaluating their effectiveness through influencing students’ professional and personal development and competent communication. Foreign authors prefer to assess how widely applicable digital educational technologies are (within the boundaries of the educational organisation and beyond), measure students’ acceptance of educational technologies and their effectiveness through the impact on improvement of educational quality. Statistically significant differences were identified for all considered functional characteristics of educational technology in Russian and foreign publications, with the exception of “Student Attitude to Educational Technology”. Both Russian and foreign authors in the last 5 years have increased their interest in mixed educational technologies and in the problems of integrating traditional and digital technologies in higher education. In Russian journals there is an increase of the number of publications about the digital technologies, and in foreign publications there is an increase in the number of publications on traditional technologies, resources and conditions for improvement of effectiveness of educational technologies.Practical significance.The materials of the article can be used in the higher educational practice and in further research on development and application of educational technologies in Russian and foreign higher education.

Design and co‐configuration for hybrid learning: Theorising the practices of learning space design

AbstractThis paper draws on a series of studies of design teams working on the creation and evaluation of novel complex learning spaces: spaces in which students' activity is situated and supported by rich mixtures of material and digital tools and resources. In most of the cases observed, students also played a substantial role in co‐configuring the learning spaces and/or the learning tasks they were set and the ways they worked with other students. The complexity of the design challenges involved revealed the inadequacy of normative models for design for learning. In other words, the people creating new spaces for hybrid learning are often doing so in ways that go beyond the capacities of existing design models. The paper draws on analyses of real‐world design practice to advance and illustrate an argument for higher level, more abstract, descriptions of how such work is done, and how design lessons learnt might be more easily shared. In so doing, the paper contributes to the literature on educational technology and learning space design by drawing out some relations between the pragmatics of design practice and the role of students' co‐configurative activity in realising instances of hybrid learning. The empirical research informing the paper was mostly undertaken in university settings, but the practical implications are of wider relevance to people who are professionally involved in shaping novel learning spaces in other areas of education and training.

A family of software product lines in educational technologies

Rapid advances in education domain demand the design and customization of educational technologies for a large scale and variety of evolving requirements. Here, scale is the number of systems to be developed and variety stems from a diversified range of instructional designs such as varied goals, processes, content, teaching styles, learning styles and, also for eLearning Systems for 22 Indian Languages and variants. In this paper, we present a family of software product lines as an approach to address this challenge of modeling a family of instructional designs as well as a family of eLearning Systems and demonstrate it for the case of adult literacy in India (287 million learners). We present a multi-level product line that connects product lines at multiple levels of granularity in education domain. We then detail two concrete product lines ( http://rice.iiit.ac.in ), one that generates instructional design editors and two, which generates a family of eLearning Systems based on flexible instructional designs. Finally, we demonstrate our approach by generating eLearning Systems for Hindi and Telugu languages, which led to significant cost savings of 29 person-months for 9 eLearning Systems.

“A Voice to Talk About it”: Cosmetologists as STEM Experts in Educational Technology Design and Implementation

Abstract In the U.S. there are steady efforts by governmental and philanthropic organizations to increase the representation of students of colour in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). After years of mixed results, researchers and educators have started to question one size fits all notions of broadening participation. An increasing number of projects are challenging universalist assumptions by enrolling the expertise of culturally situated communities of practice in STEM lessons and the educational technologies that support them. While this research shows promising results for improving young people’s interest and performance in STEM, there has been little research on how these lessons and technologies might also benefit the communities whose expertise were originally enrolled. This paper details the design of educational technologies that bridge STEM and African American cosmetology. We report on a mixed-methods research project, conducted with a group of predominantly African American cosmetologists. Qualitative and quantitative data were collected to study their attitudes toward STEM before and after working with the technologies. Our results suggest positive changes in the cosmetologists’ attitudes. We end with a critical discussion about respecting the knowledge systems of underrepresented communities of practice in educational technology research and development.