Interactions In Educational Settings Research Articles

Game theory in the classroom: low cooperative relationships identify bullying patterns in elementary schools

Cooperation and bullying have a subtle yet important interaction that influences the social dynamics in elementary school classrooms. We investigate this interplay in a large sample of 1112 students across 47 public primary classrooms in Chile. Using a video game interface to create a dyadic, non-anonymous social dilemma, we map the cooperative social network within each classroom. In addition, we collect peer nomination data and use the Illinois Bullying Scale to categorize students as bullies, victims, or bully victims. Our results indicate that low levels of received cooperation significantly increase the likelihood of students being identified with the dual role of both bully and victim, known as the bully-victim profile. This negative relationship remains robust even after controlling for demographic and classroom context variables using multilevel regression models and is consistent when employing causal inference techniques such as statistical matching. We propose that the relationship between received cooperation and the bully-victim profile stems from the capacity of received cooperation to capture key factors influencing social relationships among students, such as popularity, prosociality, GPA, and aggressiveness. Our study contributes to the understanding of human interaction in educational settings and it offers a new framework for targeted interventions in primary education, providing insights for future educational policies and practices.

What matters in AI-supported learning: A study of human-AI interactions in language learning using cluster analysis and epistemic network analysis

This study investigates how students interact with artificial intelligence (AI) for English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learning and what matters in AI-supported EFL learning. It was conducted in naturalistic learning settings, involving sixteen primary school students and lasting approximately three months. The students' usage data of an AI agent and their reflection essays about the interactions with the AI agent were analyzed using cluster analysis and epistemic network analysis based on the frameworks of community of inquiry and students' approaches to learning. The results suggest four clusters of students, each with its distinct way of interacting with AI for language learning. More importantly, the comparisons of the four clusters of students reveal that even in AI-supported learning, not everyone can benefit from the potential promised by AI. The deep approach to AI-supported learning may amplify the benefits of AI's personalized guidance and strengthen the sense of the human-AI learning community. Passively or mechanically following AI's instruction, albeit with high levels of participation, may decrease the sense of the human-AI learning community and eventually lead to low performance. This study contributes to and has implications for the educational implementation of AI, as well as the facilitation and graphical representation of learner-AI interactions in educational settings.

Engaging educators in the ideation of scenarios for cross-reality game-based learning experiences

Cross-reality media technology creates alternate reality experiences in which the physical and the virtual world are interconnected and influence each other through a network of sensors and actuators. Despite technological advances, the landscape of cross-reality technology as an enabler of alternate reality educational experiences has not been explored yet. The technical expertise required to set up and program such mixed environments is too high to engage the problem owners (i.e. educational experts) in the design process and, hence, user-driven innovation remains challenging. In this paper we explore the co-creation of cross-reality experiences for educational games. We created a no-programming toolkit that provides a visual language and interface abstractions to quickly build prototypes of cross-reality interactions. The toolkit supports experience prototyping and allows designers to coproduce, with educational experts, meaningful scenarios while they create, try out and reconfigure their prototypes. We report on a workshop with 36 educators where the toolkit was used to ideate cross-reality games for education. We discuss use cases of game-based learning applications developed by the participants that follow different pedagogical strategies and combine different physical and virtual spaces and times. We outline implications for the design of cross-reality interactions in educational settings that trigger further research and technological developments.

What drives segregation? Evidence from social interactions among students

We study the dynamics of group formation using data on the online social networks of a cohort of undergraduate students. We document gradual endogenous segregation along the ability dimension. We show that “high ability” students interact more and more with high ability students over time (active segregation). Instead, “low ability” students “reach out” to high ability students but are not reciprocated (passive segregation). Exploiting our administrative records on student performance we provide evidence that information about ability is an additional driver of social interactions in educational settings, besides the homophily hypothesis.

Dialogical interactions mediated by technology in mathematics education

This paper discusses the results of a research[1] that integrates Digital Interactive Storytelling (DIST), competence-oriented mathematical activities, and argumentation called DIST-M. The general aim is to support a reflective knowledge of mathematical concepts by implementing a digital educational device based on collaborative and dialogical activities proposed by researchers. Within a dialogical dimension of interactions (Bakhtin, 1981), argumentative practice is considered a social activity, where the acquisition and elaboration of new knowledge take place within a social space with multiple interlocutors in a dynamic process. The participants are engaged in constructing and negotiating mathematical meanings within a specific context. This dialogical approach to argumentation tends to create an authentic argumentative culture that is a system of implicit and explicit rules where the exchanges and interactions among participants require a joint elaboration of new meanings, within a given mathematical context, through a dialogical exchange. Learning and development result from a dialogical negotiation process during which new knowledge is developed and those already possessed are re-organized and systematized (Bakhtin, 1981; Vygotskij, 1978). In the current pandemic circumstances, technologies are the main tools to uphold the educational processes. Despite the fact that the DIST-M was implemented and tested before the Covid-19 era, its epistemic bases of dialogism mediated by technology could significantly keep alive the dialogic interaction in educational settings that have been heavily affected by the social distancing and promote mathematical thinking. The articles focus on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal n. 4,” Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.”
 
 [1] The research is funded by the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research under the National Project “Digital Interactive Storytelling in Mathematics: a competence-based social approach”, PRIN 2015, Prot. 20155NPRA5.

Learners’ perceived AI presences in AI-supported language learning: a study of AI as a humanized agent from community of inquiry

This study investigated the application of an artificial intelligence (AI) coach for second language (L2) learning in a primary school involving 327 participants. In line with Community of Inquiry, learners were expected to perceive social, cognitive, and teaching presences when interacting with the AI coach, which was considered a humanized agent. To examine how learners’ perceived AI presences were related to their language learning, this study drew on AI usage data, actual learning outcomes, and attitudinal data. Results from hierarchical regression analyses suggest that cognitive presence and learners’ affection for AI’s appearance were significant predictors of L2 enjoyment, which also positively predicted learning outcomes. The score of English shadowing (representing the quality of AI usage) positively predicted learning outcomes. Contrary to intuition, teaching presence was found to negatively predict learning outcomes. Based on cluster analysis and subsequent MANOVA results, this study indicates that the learners perceiving higher social and cognitive presences via interacting with AI and showing greater affection for AI’s appearance tended to use the AI coach more frequently, demonstrate higher L2 enjoyment, and achieve higher learning outcomes. The present study contributes to the limited but increasing knowledge of human-AI interaction in educational settings and carries implications for future efforts on the use of AI for L2 learning.

Making visible acts of caring among infants & toddlers

ABSTRACT This study explores how infant and toddlers become caring individuals, an aspect that has received little attention among young children’s interactions in educational settings. Research findings demonstrate how acts of caring support, embellish and expand infants’ and toddlers’ interactions. The meanings of these acts are explored based on Nodding’s notion of caring. Caring involves stepping out of one’s own personal frame of reference into the other’s and gets in touch with the Other and also understands that the other is in need of care and choosing to care for the other. The research design was guided by ethnography in education principles. Participant researchers used video recording to capture children’s interactions at this center-based setting. An analysis of the children’s interactions among other children and adults demonstrated patterns of acts of caring occurring in the classroom. Children and adults co-constructed an environment where playing and caring were intermeshed. As members of the community, infants and toddlers had opportunities to actively and competently engage in acts of caring as it is defined and practiced in this particular classroom context. Findings suggest the importance of going beyond skill-building and designing a classroom culture where children have opportunities to learn how to care for other children and adults.

Review: Chini, Marina (a cura di). (2015). Il parlato in (italiano) L2:aspetti pragmatici e prosodici. [(Italian) L2 spoken discourse: Prosodic and pragmatic aspects]. Milano, Italia: Franco Angeli.


 
 
 The volume edited by Marina Chini serves as a forum for discussion among scholars working in interlanguage prosody and pragmatics. Pragmatics is understood here in a broad sense, encompassing the encoding of informational notions in sentence structure, categories of discourse management, and features of discourse interactions in educational settings. In this review I provide an overall evaluation of the volume together with a brief summary of the individual contributions.
 
 

Analysis of person-situation interactions in educational settings via cross-classified multilevel longitudinal modeling: illustrated with the example of students’ stress experience

The investigation of learning processes by assessing students’ experience along with objective characteristics within a classroom context has a long tradition in empirical learning process research (e.g. Sembill, 1984 et passim; Wild & Krapp, 1996). However, most of the existing studies confine themselves to psychological variables that seem to be too narrowly considered, as there is theoretical and empirical evidence proving the involvement of somatic and psychological processes in learning and in stress reactions. Furthermore there is a lack of studies that investigate situation-related experience (states) as an outcome of interactions between relatively stable characteristics (traits) and continuously changing “objective” context conditions. Against this background, we will present an approach for cross-classified multilevel longitudinal modelling of person-situation interactions in naturalistic educational settings. We illustrated our model with the example of students’ stress experience referring to empirical data that we measured within a multidisciplinary research project (pedagogy, psychology, adolescent medicine). 53 students at a public German vocational school were investigated during 9 lessons. There are up to 38 state measurements per person, resulting in 2,014 measurements in total. Taking into account that states are nested within persons and within situations we applied a cross-classified multilevel model to analyse effects on students’ stress experience. The analysis shows significant person-situation interactions between academic self-concept and classroom demands and between baseline cortisol concentration and classroom demands: the relation between classroom demands and stress experience depends on relatively stable person-related characteristics. A deeper knowledge about the complex interrelations between traits, states, and continuously changing context conditions seems to be essential for a more holistic understanding of learning at school and for the identification of crucial aspects for an evidence-based design and implementation of teaching and learning arrangements.

‘We value your food but not your language’: Education systems and nation-building processes in Flanders

Education systems are crucial social and cultural apparatuses. They are designed to homogenize at least to a large extent the discourses and praxis of the citizens of a nation by channelling them as much as possible through a unified educational system. However, in ethnically and culturally diversified societies, these homogenizing social institutions can become counterproductive as they are primarily designed by and for the dominant ethnic group. This issue is particularly important in nation-building processes, something that is still explicitly ongoing in Flanders (Belgium), as these institutions put forward a unified nation with one culture and language. In this article we study how these macro-level processes can be related to the interaction processes in and between families and schools. The central research question this article tries to answer is: is the idea of a culturally and linguistically unified representation of the Flemish nation relevant when studying teacher-pupil-parent relations? We aim to build upon the existing literature by relating meso-level processes of institutional racialization and culturalization to micro-level interactions in educational settings and to macro-level processes of nation-building in Flanders. To answer these questions, we rely upon data from two qualitative research projects: (1) one study that focuses on the family socialization processes in ethnic majority and minority families and collected 42 interviews with parents; and (2) a second study that focuses on the educational trajectories of students, with specific attention on the school environment, and collected 114 interviews with students and 57 interviews with school actors. The findings show clear similarities between the macro-level processes and the interactions between families and schools in such a way that the article discusses if ongoing and explicit nation-building processes are capable of appreciating the existing diversity in a nation.

Promoting Gender Equality in Educational Settings: The Role of Computer Supported Cooperative Learning

New media makes possible new forms of collaboration and interaction in educational settings. Group-based instructional methods, as collaborative and cooperative learning can be mediated by specific computer-based applications and methods. In this article arguments are presented for differentiating collaborative and cooperative learning methods on offline and computer-mediated environments as well. In comparison to CSCL (Computer Supported Collaborative Learning), there is a well-established need for further research into the areas of Computer Supported Cooperative learning (CSCpL), with special attention paid for its impact on peer relationships in general, and social inclusion or reducing gender differences in particular.

Negotiations of Gender in Early Childhood Settings

Guest Editors: Anette Hellman and Mia Heikkila Gender research has long focused on arguments that gender is constructed through discursive and overlapping social processes. However, there is still a minimal body of research concerned with how young children learn gender through social interaction in educational settings. This point has been made by a number of authors (Arlemalm-Hagser and Pramling Samuelsson 2009; Davies 2003; Martin 2011; Paecher 2007; Thorne 1993). Taking this as the starting point for this issue, we present new research and analyses that investigate negotiations in which young children from different parts of the world ‘engage’ with different aspects of gender. All papers focus on early childhood settings where children themselves in different ways negotiate and react to gender. Questions raised include: How can negotiations of gender be described and analyzed within early childhood education? When, where and by whom are gender relations produced? Influential global discourses about children in research and policy documents discuss concepts such as competent children, children’s rights, and children’s influence. Dahlberg, Moss, and Pence (2007) noted that ideas about children and childhood are often constructed and negotiated through conflicting discourses. Children can be categorized as ‘competent’ while in another global discourse children are seen as ‘not yets’ and viewed, in the early childhood years, as only

Researching Online Foreign Language Interaction and Exchange: Theories, Methods and Challenges

Telecollaboration refers to the use of online communication tools to connect language learners in different countries in collaborative projects and intercultural exchange (Belz, 2001). The last twenty years mark an intensive period of research in online interactions and intercultural exchange. The growth of telecollaboration and online foreign language (FL) interaction in educational settings is irrefutable. This is clearly evident in the volume and concentration of research on it and its related topics, with research developing in parallel to and closely reflecting the unfolding of online interaction and exchange in the field of foreign language education (Reinhardt & Thorne, 2011). Conscious of the wide variety of approaches, paradigms, and challenges that researchers are confronted with when approaching the field of online interaction and exchange in FL education, this book presents a comprehensive guide for practitioners and newcomers alike by two of the veterans in the field, M. Dooly and R. O’Dowd.

Thick Description of the Teacher-student Relationship in the Educational Context of School: Results of an Ethnographic Field Study

Complexities of essential aspects of the teacher-student relationship were identified in a group of German adolescents and their teachers through participant observation. It is already known that the determinants of the teacher-student relationship cannot be simply categorized and analyzed as univariate features. Using Clifford Geertz’s concept of “thick description,” empirical data were collected during a six-month field study at a secondary school in the south of Germany. Thematic analyses of the extant empirical database identified six sociological principles that constitute fundamental components of the teacher-student relationship: power, dualism, solidarity, productivity, sympathy, and identity. Analyses showed that meaningful ritualized structures limit teachers and students to institutional roles that are incongruent with the general aim of having productive interactions in educational settings. The complexity of educational settings can only be grasped if the teacher-student relationship is understood as an interpersonal process. When reduced to their institutional roles, both teachers and students experienced their relationship and educational settings as unsatisfactory.

Winning the Epistemological Struggle: Constructing a Cultural Model of Shared Authority in an Elementary Classroom

Background Constructivist epistemology offers an explanation of the nature of knowledge and how people learn that has emerged as a prominent approach endorsed by schools of teacher education. This perspective stands in direct contrast to the understanding of knowledge and learning based on behaviorist epistemology. These opposing epistemological views represent two paradigms of educational practice within which the role of authority is positioned very differently, each with its own effect on the way learning is understood. When teachers are asked to redefine the role they take in classrooms, they are essentially being asked to successfully manage a shift between paradigms. This task requires the abandonment of established ways of practice and the development of new strategies of action. Focus of Study This article addresses the following questions: (1) How does a teacher go about reorganizing participation patterns in ways that redefine the habits and modes of experience that are largely taken for granted in schools? (2) What are the results in terms of the distribution of authority and whose knowledge counts? (3) What are the effects on opportunities for learning when such paradigmatic shifts are accomplished? Specifically, the intent of this study is to identify the ways in which authority was a shared construct among members of a fourth/fifth-grade classroom, how members took up the role of authority, and the effect that it had on opportunities for learning. Research Design Three classroom episodes were theoretically sampled as key events from an ethnographic data set collected over one academic year. Using an ethnographic and critical discourse approach designed to study interaction in educational settings, each episode was analyzed to illustrate how authority and the situated processes and practices associated with it were socially constituted through the language of the classroom. Evidence was provided within each set of analyses to show that these episodes were not isolated instances, but reflected established patterns of practice among participants. Conclusions Overall, the findings serve as an example of how shared authority contributes to alternative ways of viewing knowledge and whose knowledge counts, and what it means to be a learner. Most important, this study demonstrates that when shared authority is a consistent classroom practice, what emerges over time is a cultural model within which students can begin to restructure their developing epistemological frames as they revise their notions of knowledge and ways of knowing.

The Study of Social Interaction in Educational Settings: Accomplishments and Unresolved Issues1

The study of face-to-face interaction in educational settings is placed in historical context. The major themes of interactional analysis – that social and cognitive structures are constructed in social interaction, human behavior is context-specific, cultural discontinuity helps explain educational inequality, and learning is a sociocultural process – are reviewed, and the contributions of these findings to theory, methodology and pedagogy are assessed. The paper concludes with a discussion of two unresolved issues: the integration of social structure and interaction in interactional analysis and the reconciliation of conflictual and consensual dimensions of learning.

Evaluation of an occupational therapy training module: adapting clothes for persons with disabilities

AbstractThis study was initiated by a planned change in the course curriculum of the occupational therapy educational programme. The training module ‘Adapting Clothes for Persons with Disabilities’ under the present syllabus was evaluated following the model ‘Person/environment interactions in educational settings’. Thirty–five occupational therapy students completed a questionnaire before entering the training module and 32 completed the module. Six of the students were interviewed in depth. The study demonstrates the students' expectations before the module and how their attitudes, knowledge and experience resulting from participation in the course changed. The module on adapting clothes for persons who are disabled is worthy of inclusion in a modified syllabus. Copyright © 1996 Whurr Publishers Ltd.

Educational Administrators and Teacher Unions: An Alliance of Convenience

he traditional concept of conflict oriented labor-management relations that has been used to describe interaction in educational settings by theorists such as Saunders and Lovell' and Kleinman2 may no longer be applicable due to conditions markedly different from those associated with the formative stages of collective bargaining for teachers. The author suggests that administrative and teaching personnel are moving toward mutual accommodation. This development is manifest at and above the building level. It implies that accommodative behavior is rather commonplace between individual participants such as principals and building representatives, as well as between organizational participants such as teacher unions and associations representing organized administrative personnel. The purpose of this analysis, therefore, is threefold:

Social Interaction in Educational Settings

Social Interaction in Educational Settings