Quality Of Student Engagement Research Articles

Modeling novel physics in virtual reality labs: An affective analysis of student learning

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Instructional labs: Improving traditions and new directions.] We report on a study of the effects of laboratory activities that model fictitious laws of physics in a virtual reality environment on (i) students’ epistemology about the role of experimental physics in class and in the world; (ii) students’ self-efficacy; and (iii) the quality of student engagement with the lab activities. We create opportunities for students to practice physics as a means of creating and validating new knowledge by simulating real and fictitious physics in virtual reality (VR). This approach seeks to steer students away from a confirmation mindset in labs by eliminating any form of prior or outside models to confirm. We refer to the activities using this approach as Novel Observations in Mixed Reality (NOMR) labs. We examined NOMR’s effects in 100-level and 200-level undergraduate courses. Using pre-post measurements, we find that after NOMR labs, students in both populations were more expertlike in their epistemology about experimental physics and held stronger self-efficacy about their abilities to do the kinds of things experimental physicists do. Through the lens of the psychological theory of flow, we found that students engage as productively with NOMR labs as with traditional hands-on labs. This engagement persisted after the novelty of VR in the classroom wore off, suggesting that these effects were due to the pedagogical design rather than the medium of the intervention. We conclude that these NOMR labs offer an approach to physics laboratory instruction that centers the development of students’ understanding of and comfort with the authentic practice of science. Published by the American Physical Society 2024

Fiqh Learning at Madrasah Ibtidaiyah: Enhancing Students’ Academic Performance through a Collaborative Learning Model

In the context of Madrasah Ibtidaiyah, Fiqh is a mandatory subject facing challenges due to ineffective teaching methodologies, leading to suboptimal learning outcomes. This study explores the potential of collaborative learning models to enhance these outcomes, hypothesizing that such methods could improve student engagement and comprehension. Utilizing a quantitative approach, data were collected through a structured questionnaire administered to Fiqh teachers via Google Forms, focusing on the effectiveness of current teaching methods and their impact on student performance. The analysis indicated that collaborative learning significantly improves learning outcomes by fostering greater student cooperation in understanding Fiqh concepts. This enhancement in learning is evident in both the quality of student engagement and academic achievements. While the findings affirm the benefits of collaborative methods, the study is limited to these strategies and suggests further research into a variety of instructional techniques to broaden educational effectiveness in religious studies. The success of collaborative models in this setting supports their potential utility in similar educational contexts, recommending an expansion of research to include diverse pedagogical approaches.

The development and validation of the assessment engagement scale.

The quality of student engagement in assessment within higher education affects learning outcomes. However, variations in conceptions of what quality in engagement looks like impacts assessment design and the way that students and lecturers engage with each other in the assessment process. Given that assessment is an important driver of student engagement in higher education, it is surprising that no specific measures to support understanding of this measure exist. To address this significant gap, we outline the evolution of an assessment engagement scale derived from a research-informed conceptual framework utilizing best practice in assessment and feedback. We consider the validity and utility of the assessment engagement scale in supporting students' understanding of assessment and their role within it using exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses. The resultant nine-item assessment engagement scale's underpinning two factors included: (i) Understanding of the Assessment Context (UAC) including one's role within it, and confidence in navigating assessment requirement, and (ii) Realising Engagement Opportunities (REO) (i.e., willingness to engage and ability to utilise the assessment context effectively to support one's understanding). Construct, criterion, and convergent validity of the scale were established. The AES is a powerful tool in promoting dialogue between lecturers and students about what high quality engagement in assessment looks like, and the respective roles of all parties in realising this. Implications for assessment practices are discussed along with the potential of the scale as a predictive and developmental tool to support enhancements in assessment design and student learning outcomes in higher education.

Engagement in At-Risk Students Trajectories: Perspective From The Levels of Approach To The Student

Student engagement within education has been an area of increasing interest over recent years as one of the factors that needs to be taken into consideration when addressing one of the main issues in education - school dropout. The objective of this paper is to provide oversight of how being engaged in the educational trajectories of young people who are at risk takes place. This will involve applying the theory of life course as the main driver of the research. A qualitative method is used which adopts a biographical and narrative approach via semi structured in-depth interviews. The main results have revealed that: 1) there are stages in which events that facilitate positive or negative engagement are more predominant; 2) generally, there are more negative critical events that result in a decline in the quality of student engagement; 3) there are several factors that stand out in each of the stages of the student trajectories.

Effectiveness, efficiency, engagement: Mapping the impact of pre-lecture quizzes on educational exchange

Our study addresses a systemic issue facing higher education – a lack of rigorous educational research alongside new technology-assisted ways of teaching and learning. The issue highlights the disciplinary disconnect as many academics do not research outside their discipline, yet are tasked with educational modernisation through trying out new educational technology. Addressing this issue, we present our conceptual framework, the course transaction space (CT-space), and use it to analyse the impact of an intervention we designed that involved the use of regular online pre-lecture quizzes in a university mathematics course. The aim of the intervention was to optimise the effect of distributed (spaced) practice on long-term retention. Our findings suggest that a relatively small change in course instruction can improve the efficiency and effectiveness of educational exchange. Our analyses of data from multiple sources provide evidence that our intervention resulted in a sustained increase in the frequency of students’ engagement with the content, increased attendance of lectures, and improved grades. Additionally, we discuss the impact of our intervention on the quality of student engagement with reference to competence related beliefs and self-efficacy. Finally, we discuss how our intervention can be used in other contexts for supporting an evidence-based approach to teaching and learning.
 Implications for practice or policy 
 
 For teachers designing an intervention with the aim of improving students’ learning engagement during a course of tertiary study, we advise incorporating a series of frequent low stakes online quizzes with low level of difficulty.
 For students, these will act as an incentive, enabling improvement in the frequency of their learning engagement and its quality.
 The course transaction space (CT-space) model can be used to explore and analyse the impact of a variety of interventions introduced in tertiary courses through the lens of engagement.

Psychological Needs and the Quality of Student Engagement in Physical Education: Teachers as Key Facilitators

Motivation research is central to understanding why certain students exhibit high levels of behavioral, cognitive, and emotional engagement with learning, and why others lack interest, display boredom, and withdraw effort (i.e., are disaffected). In this review, tenets within self-determination theory (SDT) are used to provide a theoretically-informed account of student engagement and disaffection in the context of school physical education (PE). Our review centers on the proposition within SDT that the satisfaction of basic psychological needs (i.e., for autonomy, competence, and relatedness) provide the energizing basis for optimal motivational functioning and wellness. Teacher strategies and class structures are reviewed in the context of whether they satisfy or frustrate these psychological needs. To amalgamate the reviewed literature, a mediated model depicting a ‘student-teacher dialectical’ framework is presented. Several practitioner recommendations for supporting student engagement in PE are then offered. Lastly, findings of past interventions within the school context are presented and discussed.

Protocol for the Assessment of Common Core Teaching: the Impact of Instructional Inclusion on Students with Special Needs

The quality of instruction in the classroom is the most powerful leverage point for school improvement because it is the only thing over which educators have a significant degree of control. As student assessments change to reflect the higher expectations of Common Core State Standards (CCSS), it is important that the assessment and development of teaching correspond with those expectations. The purpose of this study was to assess the quality of student engagement in general education classrooms and then compare the engagement of individual students with special needs with the engagement of their general education peers. The goal was to determine whether or not Individual Education Plan (IEP) goals were being met when services were provided in the general education classroom. The Protocol for the Assessment of Common Core Teaching (ProACCT) is an integrated observation instrument that measures academic engagement on three dimensions: student participation, the cognitive demand of lesson tasks, and the academic language used by students when they are learning content. The protocol was adapted to measure academic engagement individually so stakeholders could understand the levels of support required to ensure students with special needs have access to effective Common Core instruction.

Integrating Two Measures of Quality Practice into Clinical and Practical Legal Education Assessment: Good client interviewing and effective community legal education

<p>This paper will examine, through two case studies (an undergraduate clinical program and a Practical Legal Education (PLE) advice clinic) the scope for indicators developed by Curran to assess the outcomes, effectiveness and quality of legal assistance service in Australia to be used in clinical assessment. This article will explore how two particular indicators evaluated as fundamental in that research might be utilised to assess students so as to enhance the quality of their clinical participation.</p><p>Clinical Legal Education is seen by its adherents as ‘a premier method of learning and teaching. Its intensive, one-on-one or small group nature can allow students to apply legal theory and develop their lawyering skills to solve client legal problems. Its teaching pedagogy is distinguished by a system of self-critique and supervisory feedback enabling law students to learn how to learn from their experiences’. In many senses it is a form of experiential learning through engagement with the practice of law.It aims to contextualise the study of law and draw on student learning in other courses to guide and support them in identifying, developing and applying ethical legal practice skills. But its scope is much wider than simply ‘skills’, it also aims to develop students’ critical understanding of approaches to legal practice, to their understanding of the roles of lawyers in relation to individual clients and social justice issues and to encourage and as a means to validate student aspirations to promote access to justice and equality through the law.</p><p>We suggest ways to assess the quality of such engagement by clinical students, focusing on Curran’s core quality measures of ‘a good client interview’ and ‘quality community legal education’. The value of utilising these two indicators to assess the quality of student engagement is that they themselves are core to the activities in which students are involved in clinic.</p>

Institutional research and improving the quality of student engagement

This article asks whether institutional research could help improve the quality of student engagement by researching at sub-institutional levels such as in courses bridging students from school into higher education. In answer it argues two interacting propositions: one, that student engagement provides useful indicators of quality in higher education; and, two, that research into student engagement is best conducted at a sub-institutional level. The authors use evidence obtained from a funded Teaching and Learning Research Initiative project in New Zealand to support these propositions. The project gauged the perceptions of first-time students in four different bridging (access) courses in one higher education institution. Results showed significant differences in the way they perceived the efforts of teachers and the institution to support their engagement. Not only did course results differ from institutional scores, courses also differed significantly from each other. These results suggest that the quality of student engagement could be enhanced if institutional research focused closely on engagement at sub-institutional levels such as courses.

‘Economics with Training Wheels’: Using Blogs in Teaching and Assessing Introductory Economics

Blogs provide a dynamic interactive medium for online discussion, consistent with communal constructivist pedagogy. The author of this article describes and evaluates a blog assignment used in the teaching and assessment of a small (40–60 students) introductory economics course. Using qualitative and quantitative data collected across four semesters, students’ participation in the blog assignment is found to be associated with student ability, gender, and student perceptions of the blog. Importantly, students with past economics experience do not appear to crowd out novice economics students. Student performance is positively associated with the quality of their blog participation after controlling for student ability, suggesting that a focus on quality of student engagement could further improve learning outcomes. Students generally report overall positive experiences with the blog assignment.

Getting students engaged

We live and work in challenging times. Now that it seems certain (post Browne, 2010) that the fees students pay for their higher education experience will double (or worse), we can't be surprised that the emphasis on 'the student experience' of higher education will intensify. Whether students are saddling themselves with ever-increasing amounts of debt to afford that higher education experience, or whether it is parents who foot the bill, the spotlight continues to focus ever more sharply on student satisfaction, alongside all available measures of the quality of student engagement in higher education. We already have league tables in which the reflection of the student experience as gained from the National Student Survey features prominently. And with diminishing budgets for teaching, class sizes are likely to continue to grow - in those disciplines where higher education survives least scathed. So how can we meet the challenge of 'getting students engaged'?

Design students' experience of engagement and creativity

The terms creativity and engagement are used broadly throughout the literature and are in common usage in our education and design language. Students, however, understand these terms in unexpected ways and this can sometimes cause a disjunction between the teacher's intention for the learning activity and the ways in which the student may go about it. In this article we tease out the relationships between engagement and creativity for student learning in design. Our data suggest that engagement relies on certain conditions and attributes that have to be met before a student makes a personally meaningful commitment to study. Engagement here means some form of interlocking between the student and the task, or some form of attentiveness facilitated by the teacher or the environment. By creativity we mean the meshing between person, process and product which is then appreciated by the broader design community. We suggest that understanding creativity as a complex attribute contributes to the nature and quality of student engagement with their learning and the profession.

Digital Photography and Web-based Assignments in an Urban Field Course: Snapshots from Berlin

This paper reflects on the use of digital photography in urban-based human geography fieldwork. It draws on the authors' experience of introducing digital photography into the teaching and assessment of a level 3 undergraduate field course in Berlin. To begin they outline how they sought to use simple digital technologies in order to facilitate student engagement within Berlin and to widen the range of assessment avenues available to students. They concentrate in particular on how it provided the opportunity to develop Web-based assessments. In the second half of the paper they reflect on student experience of the use of digital cameras and Web-based assessment. While acknowledging some of the problems with using technology in this way, they conclude by arguing that digital photography not only enhances the quality of student engagement with urban environments but also provides a way of more effectively integrating the field-, class- and Web-based components of urban field courses.

Mrs Blue Gum, Some Puppets and a Remnant Forest: Towards Sustainability Education through Drama Pedagogy

AbstractThis paper focuses on a case study of the collaborative development of an environmental education unit involving the use of puppetry and drama. The collaboration was between an experienced classroom teacher beginning to use drama, and a drama/environmental educator and researcher. The critical lens for the analysis was sustainability education, including how this aligns with some recent theory on multiplist and evaluativist meaning-making. It is argued that these modes of meaning-making are necessary pedagogical goals of an eco-connected pedagogy. This case study showed that collaborative planning, implementation and reflection of drama pedagogy was not only a catalyst for more complex and deeper levels of meaning-making for the classroom teacher, but also prompted discussion about other important issues such as the quality of student engagement, classroom power dynamics and authentic assessment. In addition the teacher observed a range of outcomes achieved by her students that align with sustainability education as they became immersed in a dramatic world. In particular she observed that the students, through role-playing and writing about points of view not necessarily their own, developed deeper understandings demonstrating multiplist and evaluativist meaning creation.

Structured cognitive discussions in senior high school physics: Student and teacher perceptions

Concern with the quality of student engagement and learning in senior high school physics has been evident for many years. In this study we have focussed on student engagement. Three tasks that utilised a structured discussion, approach to learning concepts in mechanics were developed in collaborative work with two Year 11 physics teachers. These tasks demanded an initial individual response from each student, then a single response from groups of three, and then a whole class interpretive dicussion led by the teacher and based on the group responses. We report the detail of reactions of students and teachers to these tasks in the two classes taught by the teachers involved in the development of the tasks, and more general reactions from a further seven Year 11 physics classes.