— an incomplete summary of my AERA experience

 

The 2017 annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association has just concluded. Taking with me the purpose of seeking inspirations for my future research as well as of seeing what researches are being done in related fields, I found quite a lot interesting studies. It can take me several blog posts to include all that I’d like to share with you, so let’s just focus on the approaches and strategies that can potentially improve students learning performance in this post.

 

1

Do you realize you gesture when you want to express things that are hard to express verbally? Andrade
and Danish from Indiana University studied the elicited gestures and learning gains in an embodied learning environment. They introduced a simulation-based tutorial to help students explore ecosystems dynamics. Students use gestures to follo
w the bar chart (figure 1), and the program will generate the line graph by detecting their gestures. Gestures can reveal a tacit level of understanding, as well as implicit knowledges, which provides a second window onto the someone’s thoughts. Gesturing may not inform how go
od or bad the representation is, but may show how students actively integrate new information into their existing schemas.

Figure 1

2

In addition to interfering with the learning, many researchers are interested in studying the methods of observing the learning performance. For example, Litts (Utah State University), Kafai (U Penn), and Lui (U Penn) studied the interactions between 2 kids who are in the same groups when it comes to e-textiles maker projects, and developed a theoretical model that helps people to understand the interaction type (Figure 2). When the interaction between 2 kids is supportive and individual, they work on two independent tasks but offer helps to the partner when needed. When the two kids work on independent tasks and are reluctant to provide help to their partner,
then the interaction can be called individual and inhibitive. In the same manner, you can speculate that supportive and collaborative interaction is the type in which kids work together on each task and help each other. And, inhibitive and collaborative interaction is the type in which kids work on every task together but would not like to do their partner a favor when they have problem. Apparently, interactions between 2 people can be more complicated than these 4 types. Yet, this model provides an angle through which to look at the interaction on single/multiple learner dimension as well as the affective dimension at the same time.

Figure 2

 

3

This next study is also about a model that helps us understand learning in the informal setting. Slattery and Lyons, from University of Illinois at Chicago research on how students make sense of an interactive zoo exhibit.This model (Figure 3) includes 3 primary elements: personal, virtual, and external. “Personal” means feelings, experiences, gestures, first- and second-person references; “Virtual” means digital entities, game roles, and other non-physical or conceptual objects; and “External” means real world objects, people or animals, third-person references, proximal or distal. As you can tell, the interlaced relationship among these 3 factors indicates that interactive exhibits allow learners to associate the new schema to their existing knowledges through the digital media and real-world experiences. I bet the interactions among students as well as between students and staff/teacher also plays an important role here.

Figure 3

 

4

A research group (Turkay and Moulton) in Harvard did a study that confirms one of our prediction about multimedia-supported learning. That is the effects of whiteboard animations when learning with popular social science lessons. They compared the learning using animation, slides, audio, text and lecture. They found that animation-facilitated learning has a relatively longer persistent period, meaning that students would be more likely to come back to learn if they were introduced to social sciences via animation. Plus, animation helps with the learning enjoyment, engagement, and even the motivation to take challenges.

 

5

During the last day of the annual meeting, I coincidentally saw two very different researches using the same data collection strategy, the Delphi method, which was new to me. In case you don’t know it, Delphi method is an interactive forecasting method which relies on a panel of experts. The experts are asked to take a questionnaire in 2-3 rounds. From the second round, an anonymised summary will be given to the experts, so that they can adjust their answers according to it. It is believed that the range of the answers will decrease after several rounds and finally converges to a more accurate answer.

One of the two researches is about the challenges when moving from K-20 education to industry, and the suggestions given to students. The other research is about K-12 music education in the States, and what can be improved in terms of the curricula. The size of the panel of experts in the first study is about 15 people, and that of the second study is about 50 people. I would still question the validity of this method, since a small group of experts might not have the “right” vision of the future. So, we should treat the implications of these studies cautiously.