Investigation Of Learners Research Articles

Investigation of Learners’ Perceptions of Stages in Group Work

Investigation of Learners’ Perceptions of Stages in Group Work

Investigation of Learners’ Perception of Stages in Group Work

Investigation of Learners’ Perception of Stages in Group Work

Investigation of learners’ behavioral intentions to use metaverse learning environment in higher education: a virtual computer laboratory

ABSTRACT The aim of this study is to investigate the determinants that affect undergraduate students’ behavioral intentions to continue learning computer hardware concepts utilizing a Metaverse-based system. The current study examined the factors influencing students’ adoption of Metaverse technology at the tertiary level using a model based on the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) and the General Extended Technology Acceptance Model for E-Learning (GETAMEL). The data was collected from 210 undergraduate students and Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) was adopted to analyze the responses. The findings show that Perceived Usefulness and Hedonic Motivation have significant positive effect on Behavioral Intention. Additionally, Natural Interaction and Perceived Usefulness significantly affect Hedonic Motivation, while Computer Anxiety negatively affects Hedonic Motivation. Furthermore, Natural Interaction was found to be the strongest predictor of Perceived Usefulness, whereas Experience was the strongest predictor of Perceived Ease of Use. The findings also indicate that Subjective Norms and Self-Efficacy have a significant effect on Experience, while Subjective Norms significantly influence Self-Efficacy. The research results also showed that neither gender nor the department had any effect. The results of this study provide major practical outcomes for higher education institutions and teachers in terms of designing Metaverse-based teaching environments.

An Investigation of Learners’ Perceived Progress During Online Education: Do Self-Efficacy Belief, Language Learning Motivation, and Metacognitive Strategies Matter?

Despite the large quantity of research projects about online learning, studies on students’ language learning motivation, self-efficacy belief, and metacognitive strategy use in the online learning setting are limited. The present paper aims to fill this gap through assessing learners’ metacognitive strategies, language learning motivation, self-efficacy belief, and their perceived progress in English learning. Responses to surveys were administered two times. The collected data were subject to longitudinal mediation analysis. The participants were a total of 627 university students in China. Results showed a positive and significant relationship among the four variables. The findings highlighted four significant longitudinal mediation patterns. Overall, self-efficacy belief predicted the use of metacognitive strategies, which in turn predicted their language learning motivation and perceived online English learning progress. The findings supported the mediating role of language learning motivation and metacognitive strategies. The findings showed the potential to enhance online English learning by facilitating learners’ self-efficacy belief, language learning motivation, and metacognitive strategies.

An Investigation of Learners’ Motivational Drive to Learn Foreign Language: A Look at Vroom’s Expectancy Theory

In this globalized world, foreign language learning has become increasingly imperative. Despite the absence of an optimal linguistic environment, a heightened level of motivation is essential for mastering a foreign language. Learners are likely to experience demotivation when they exert significant effort in language acquisition without experiencing immediate improvement in their language proficiency. Consequently, understanding the motivational constructs in foreign language learning, particularly at the onset of the learning process, is vital. To this end, a quantitative study was conducted utilizing Vroom’s (1964) expectancy theory and Pintrich and De Groot’s (1990) motivational scale theory as the conceptual framework. The study involved administering a 26-item survey, which used 5-point Likert scales to 108 respondents studying French as a foreign language at a beginner level in a Malaysian public university. The survey was divided into four sections: demographic profile, instrumentality, expectancy, and valence. The findings revealed that learners exhibited both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and had a positive perception of the importance of foreign language acquisition. Additionally, respondents had a strong belief in their ability to attain a high grade through hard work, although the fear of failure negatively impacted their motivation levels. Notably, there was a significant relationship between instrumentality, expectancy, and valence. These findings provide valuable insights into the motivational factors involved in foreign language learning at the beginner level and can potentially contribute to the cultivation of motivation in the foreign language classroom.

Praxis and Effectiveness of Pedagogy during Pandemic: An Investigation of Learners’ Perspective

Changes in the style of education, from traditional to e-learning to online education, will have enormous implications in all parts of human existence, particularly in a student’s life, according to the current scenario. The underlying debate now is whether the curriculum design, the pedagogy, and the entire transformative process of online education should be progressive or regressive. The fundamental goal is to use technological platforms to make learning easier. The primary goal is to see if students have acclimated to the e-learning environment during the COVID-19 outbreak. How are students mentally dealing with it, with or without gratification? Are they dealing with computer phobia or simply enrolling in a course? The goal is to concentrate on the three E’s: encourage, explore, and evaluate the process of online teaching and learning efficacy, based on input from millions of students worldwide. The study has comprehensively examined the principles, difficulties, and praxis of online educational pedagogy to map efficacy and efficiency. The critical contribution of the research is the result claiming the potentiality of technology and the obstacles students face while learning due to such digital mechanisms.

Collocation Use in EFL Learners' Writing Across Multiple Language Proficiencies: A Corpus-Driven Study.

The investigation of learners’ interlanguage could greatly contribute to the teaching of English as a foreign language and the development of teaching materials. The present study investigates the collocational profiles of large-scale written production by English learners with varied L1 backgrounds and different proficiency levels. Using the British National Corpus as reference corpus, learners’ collocation use was extracted by corpus query language and further identified by t-score via Python programming language. The collocation list consists of 2,501 make/take + noun (the direct object) collocations. Findings show that proficient learners tend to use collocations containing more semantically complicated and abstract noun elements for varied communication tasks. Moreover, advanced learners are inclined to use collocations comprised of more difficult and longer noun elements.

An Investigation of Learners’ Writing Self-Efficacy and Risk Taking in Writing

This study was a quantitative research conducted to find out the correlation between writing self-efficacy and writing. Additionally, this study also aimed to find the correlation between risk taking and writing. The subjects of this study were first grade students of vocational school. The instruments were writing self-efficacy questionnaire, writing risk taking questionnaire, and writing test. To analyse the data for both objectives, Spearman rho was used. The result showed firstly that there was not any significant correlation between writing self-efficacy and writing. Secondly, it was identified that there was not any significant correlation between writing risk taking and writing. Keywords: writing self-efficacy, writing risk taking, and writing.

An Investigation of Learners’ Perception of an Online Intercultural Communicative Competence (ICC) Training Model

Developing students’ Intercultural communicative competence (ICC) has been viewed as the English as a foreign language teachers’ responsibility in the globalized world, especially after the birth of COVID-19 pandemic. Amidst the flourishing development of ICC cultivation studies, a noted absence is on the study of how to actualize ICC in the online teaching based English language teaching. This study, by presenting a pedagogical case, explores the application of the online ICC training model, and focuses on how the online teaching can be established at the four teaching stages, namely, attitude development, knowledge construction, skills practice, and reflection. Attitude development is a pre-class activity to motivate students’ learning curiosity. In the stage of knowledge construction, various kinds of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are selected as teaching resources for students to learn the key concepts and theories for the course. Skills practice requires students to make full use of WeChat or Bulletin Board System (BBS) to have online intercultural encounter, in this process students practice both their linguistic and intercultural communicative competence. The last stage provides chances for both students and teacher to rethink about their learning and teaching and move to the new circle of teaching stages. An eight-weeks’ action research with a class of second-grade English Majors in a Chinese university has been conducted. Questionnaire and interview are the main methods for data collection, combined with teacher and students’ reflective journals. The results of both quantitative and qualitative evaluation show that adopting online-teaching may serve as an effective way to develop students’ ICC during epidemic and in the future.

An investigation of learners’ use of CAN and COULD

CAN and COULD have multiple uses and multiple interpretations which can be difficult for learners of English to understand. For example, the difference of Can you help me? and Could you help me? may go unnoticed to an English language learner, but a native speaker of English would recognise a difference in politeness. The current paper reports on an investigation of learners’ use of the modal auxiliaries CAN and COULD, including their negative counterparts (cannot/can’t and could not/couldn’t), in an English Proficiency Program (EPP) classroom at a New Zealand University. Through first examining the learners’ use of CAN and COULD in spoken and written contexts, comparisons are made to their use in the British National Corpus, which results in the identification of areas in which learners’ use could be strengthened.

An Investigation of Learners’ Perceptions on Action Learning-based Lessons for General English Course at a University

An Investigation of Learners’ Perceptions on Action Learning-based Lessons for General English Course at a University

Impact of Chinese Culture on Pre-service Science Teachers’ Views of the Nature of Science

This study examines Chinese pre-service teachers’ (N = 30) views on the nature of science (NOS) and how Chinese culture influences their views. Participants were from two teachers’ universities in eastern China. As an exploratory and interpretive study, a scenario-based interview approach was adopted. The results indicated that the participants held unique views about the five key aspects of NOS. Many participants have alternative and contemporary views of NOS, but few possess classical views. In fact, teachers adopted features of the Confucian Doctrine of the Mean either consciously or unconsciously to account for their views of NOS. This research reflects that the Doctrine of the Mean affected Chinese teachers’ views of NOS, making them rather deficient in their understandings of classical NOS. Based on empirical data, it is argued that science teacher training in China should focus on the content and objectives of classical NOS, rather than just teaching contemporary views of NOS. Taking Chinese culture into consideration, science teacher education in China cannot entirely import the strategies of teaching the classical views of NOS from the developed world, but should develop, design and contextualize local strategies that are suitable for the training of Chinese science teachers. Some issues for further investigation of learners’ views of NOS in non-Western contexts are suggested as implications from this study.

Collaborative tasks in web conferencing: A case study on Chinese online

This case study aimed to explore best practice in applying task-based language teaching (tblt) via a Web-conferencing tool, Blackboard Collaborate, in a beginners’ online Chinese course by evaluating the pedagogical values and limitations of the software and the tasks designed. Chapelle’s (2001) criteria for computer-assisted language learning (call) task appropriateness were adopted and adapted to evaluate five tasks designed for an online environment in terms of practicality, language learning potential, learner fit, authenticity, and positive effects. Sixteen undergraduate on-campus students who enrolled in an introductory Chinese language course participated in this project. Five fortnightly 1-hour online sessions were conducted, which included two jigsaw tasks, two decisionmaking tasks, and one information-gap task. Learners’ interaction in the online sessions was recorded and transcribed to conduct a thorough investigation of learners’ negotiation actions in peer-to-peer interaction. Their experiences of using Blackboard Collaborate and carrying out the tasks were recorded in in-depth interviews and pre- and post-session questionnaires.

An Empirical Investigation of Learners’ Decision to Resume an Online Degree Program

In is evident that the technology has become the key to a new world of education, where lectures are delivered and accessed without the time and distance boundaries. However, e-learning is more than just posting static or interactive material, or recording live sessions through the Learning Management Systems (LMS). While this may reduce cost and attract some learners, it may provide very little to some other learners. This study investigates the factors that could influence the online learner’s attitudes towards resuming learning via the different models. There are many models of instructional design being used by different institution, and this research does not evaluate a specific model, and the LMS is used as a general concept. The study model was initially developed, which contained seven constructs, and a questionnaire was made up of the seven constructs, and distributed among online learners community. Using the responses of 387 learners, this research finds that all of the hypotheses are confirmed except for one. The decision to resume an online degree program found to be effected by the gained knowledge, the course content quality, and the use of suitable and proper course delivery medium (interactive material, audio, and presentations, recording live sessions). The data analysis indicates that the existence of suitable search options, the availability of appropriate relevant material, and a user friendly interface, are critical factors.

Designing scaffolding in a digital English textbook for high school low achievers: A case study.

English divide is getting more aggravated in Korean English class notwithstanding the longitudinal nation-wide effort for differentiated education. Use of a digital textbook in English class has been considered as a solution which reduces those problems and fosters learner-centered learning. However, there has not been enough investigation of learners’ needs in designing digital textbooks. Therefore, this study intends to investigate English learning needs of low achieving high school students and to provide some implications for a more effective digital textbook design. This study, first, conducted a survey with 89 high school students asking their learning, perception and scaffolding needs in English class. Second, this study qualitatively gathered the data from five low proficient students who were asked to use a digital English textbook in the regular class for four weeks. The participants utilized the digital textbook with no difficulty according to their purposes in varied ways. The data analysis reveals that the students perceived the digital textbook as an assisting tool, not a main textbook, and their perceptions were mostly positive. Some technological challenges and students’ resistance have also emerged, which should be overcome for the continued use.

An investigation of learners' collaborative knowledge construction performances and behavior patterns in an augmented reality simulation system

The purpose of this study was to investigate how a mobile collaborative augmented reality (AR) simulation system affects learners' knowledge construction behaviors and learning performances. In this study, 40 undergraduate students were recruited and divided into dyads to discuss a given task either with the assistance of a mobile collaborative AR system or traditional 2D simulation system. The participants' knowledge acquisition regarding elastic collision was evaluated through a pre-test and a post-test comparison. Learners' knowledge construction behaviors were qualitatively identified according to an adapted three-category coding scheme including construction of problem space (PS), construction of conceptual space (CS), and construction of relations between conceptual and problem space (CPS), and were then analyzed by adopting lag sequential analysis. The results indicated that the learners who learned with the AR system showed significant better learning achievements than those who learned with the traditional 2D simulation system. Furthermore, the sequential patterns of the learners' behaviors were identified, including three sustained loops (PS→PS, CS→CS, CPS→CPS), a bi-directional path between the PS and CPS activities (PS↔CPS), and a one way path from the PS activity to the CS activity (PS→CS). The revealed behavior patterns suggest that the AR Physics system may serve as a supportive tool and enable dyad learners to respond quickly to the displayed results and support their knowledge construction processes to produce a positive outcome. Based on the behavioral patterns found in this study, suggestions for future studies and further modifications to the system are proposed.

Investigation of learners' perceptions for video summarization and recommendation

Recently, multimedia-based learning is widespread in educational settings. A number of studies investigate how to develop effective techniques to manage a huge volume of video sources, such as summarization and recommendation. However, few studies examine how these techniques affect learners' perceptions in multimedia learning systems. This article aims to examine learners' perceptions for summarization and recommendation, with an emphasis on the perspective of prior experience. In this study, we developed a multimedia content summarization and recommendation system, which can automatically extract summaries from raw video sources and recommend suitable video content to learners through emails. The results demonstrate that learners' prior experience and preferences for the presentation of document types affect their perceptions, including the enhancement of interests, the ease of information acquisition and the intention for the further use of the system. Finally, the findings are applied to develop a framework that can support for the design of multimedia learning systems.

Language Learners Learning Independently

Independent language learning is an essential complement to classroom-based learning, both for reasons of efficiency in learning and as a means to develop learner autonomy. In an effort to encourage out-of-class learning, many institutions in the last ten years have established language resource centres where learners are encouraged to learn independently. This article reports on an investigation of the perceptions and practices of a group of learners enrolled in an intensive English course in relation to their out-of-class language learning. The investigation included an evaluation of the self-access resources in terms of their efficiency and effectiveness as welll as an investigation of learners' understanding of the concepts involved in independent learning. It was found that learners hold positive attitudes towards independent learning, and a number of factors contributing to these perceptions were identified. However, it was also found that these attitudes were based on a rather shallow awareness of what independent learning entails.

How hospital ward members treat learner nurses: an investigation of learners' perceptions in a British hospital.

Twenty-five learner nurses who had just completed their first two wards were questionned about the behaviour of other ward members towards them. Although many ward sisters' and charge nurses' behaviour was positive towards learners, just under 50% of learners' responses indicated that the ward sister/charge nurse was sometimes rude and did not make them feel 'at home'. The ward sister/charge nurse's behaviour was, on average, more negative than another liked qualified staff, whose behaviour was more negative than a more experienced student on the ward. The ward sister/charge nurse's behaviour was the major determinant of ward preference by the learner. However, the behaviour of ward members tended to correlate, providing evidence of a 'ward atmosphere'. There is a need for leadership and educational training for ward sisters and charge nurses.