The Importance of Teacher Bridging in Game-Based Learning Classrooms

Advances in game-based learning and educational data mining enable novel methods of formative assessment that can reveal implicit understandings that students may demonstrate in games but may not express formally on a test. This chapter explores a framework of bridging in game-based learning classes, where teachers leverage and build upon students' game-based implicit learning experiences to support science classroom learning. Bridging was studied with two physics learning games in about 30 high-school classes per game. Results from both studies show that students in bridging classes performed better on external post-tests, when accounting for pre-test scores, than in classes that only played the game or did not play the game at all. These findings suggest the teachers' role is critical in game-based learning classes. Effective bridging includes providing teachers with common game examples along with actionable discussion points or activities to connect game-based learning with classroom content.

Socioscientific-Issues Based Classroom Intervention on Grade 10 Students’ Learning Achievement and Scientific Reasoning

Socioscientific-issues based instruction can promote science to students as a tool for necessary learning in the disruptive world. This instruction helps students critique and response as its nature of science, gaining higher-ordered thinking, and discussing with scientific reasoning. The objectives of this study were to compare learning achievement and scientific reasoning of grade 10 students. The topic “DNA technology” was employed with 90 grade 10 students from 2 classrooms. The quasi-experimental research was designed by comparing learning achievement and scientific reasoning between 2 learning organizations. The research tools were socioscientific-issues based and inquiry-based lesson plans, the achievement test consist of 30 items of 4 choices multiple test and scientific reasoning test. The statistic used to test the hypothesis was independent t-test. The results indicated that students had no difference score of learning achievement between learning organizations. While socioscientific-issues based learning had score of scientific reasoning higher than inquiry-based learning at the .05 level of statistically significance. The study can summarize that socioscientific-issues based learning can promote scientific reasoning to science classroom.

Developments and Emerging Trends of Blended Learning: A Document Co-citation Analysis (2003–2020)

This study aims to analyze and visualize the research hotspots, evolution, and emerging trends of blended learning in a holistic way. In this study, 1657 biblio-metric records together with 48310 citations are collected from SCIE, SSCI and A&HCI databases. CiteSpace is adopted in the analysis and visualization. Results show: enhancing collaborative learning, pattern, and teacher training are the re-search hotspots in Period I, instructor perception, possible future direction, and research trend are the research hotspots in Period II, general science classroom, blended learning environment, and measuring student engagement are the re-search hotspots in Period III; the themes of covid-19 remain similar along the de-velopment, while the themes of digital health education change a lot; blended learning environment, online component, covid-19 pandemic, procrastinating be-havior, active blended learning, and observed learning orientation are the emerg-ing trends. These findings could provide research directions for future studies in blended learning.

Students’ multimodal knowledge sharing in school: Spatial repertoires and semiotic assemblages

In a world ‘flooded’ with data, students in school need adequate tools as Visual Analytics (VA), that easily process mass data, give support in drawing advanced conclusions and help to make informed predictions in relation to societal circumstances. Methods for how the students’ insights may be reformulated and presented in ‘appropriate’ modes are required as well. Therefore, the aim in this study is to analyse elementary school students’ practices of communicating visual discoveries, their insights, as the final stage in the knowledge-building process with an VA-application for interactive data visualization. A design-based intervention study is conducted in one social science classroom to explore modes for students presentation of insights, constructed from the interactive data visualizations. Video captures are used to document 30 students’ multifaceted presentations. The analyses are based on concepts from Pennycook (2018) and Deleuze and Guattari (1987). To account for how different modes interact, when students present their findings, one significant empirical sequence is described in detail. The emerging communicative dimensions (visual-, bodily- and verbal-) are embedded within broad spatial repertoires distributing flexible semiotic assemblages. These assemblages provide an incentive for the possibilities of teachers’ assessments of their students’ knowledge outcomes.

Empowering Teachers with AI: Co-Designing a Learning Analytics Tool for Personalized Instruction in the Science Classroom

AI-based educational technology that is designed to support teachers in providing personalized instruction can enhance their ability to address the needs of individual students, hopefully leading to better learning gains. This paper presents results from participatory research aimed at co-designing with science teachers a learning analytics tool that will assist them in implementing a personalized pedagogy in blended learning contexts. The development process included three stages. In the first, we interviewed a group of teachers to identify where and how personalized instruction may be integrated into their teaching practices. This yielded a clustering-based personalization strategy. Next, we designed a mock-up of an AI-based tool that supports this strategy and worked with another group of teachers to define an `explainable learning analytics' scheme that explains each cluster in a way that is both pedagogically meaningful and can be generated automatically. Third, we developed an AI algorithm that supports this `explainable clusters' pedagogy and conducted a controlled experiment that evaluated its contribution to teachers' ability to plan personalized learning sequences. The planned sequences were evaluated in a blinded fashion by an expert, and the results demonstrated that the experimental group -- teachers who received the clusters with the explanations -- designed sequences that addressed the difficulties exhibited by different groups of students better than those designed by teachers who received the clusters without explanations. The main contribution of this study is twofold. First, it presents an effective personalization approach that fits blended learning in the science classroom, which combines a real-time clustering algorithm with an explainable-AI scheme that can automatically build pedagogically meaningful explanations from item-level meta-data (Q Matrix). Second, it demonstrates how such an end-to-end learning analytics solution can be built with teachers through a co-design process and highlights the types of knowledge that teachers add to system-provided analytics in order to apply them to their local context. As a practical contribution, this process informed the design of a new learning analytics tool that was integrated into a free online learning platform that is being used by more than 1000 science teachers.

Student-teacher interaction in CLIL and non-CLIL elementary education

This study analyzes interaction in a primary school science classroom. We compare the verbal scaffolding strategies used by a teacher during lessons from the same instructional unit taught in CLIL (English) and regular (Spanish) contexts. Results show that although there was no difference in the amount of information (‘content’) made available to students through the interactions, different verbal strategies were used (precision, justification and recall were more frequent in Spanish and exemplification in English) and that students were more active in engaging with science knowledge in the Spanish context. We discuss these findings in relation to the level of abstraction the teacher supported in interacting about science in the regular session, with implications for supporting children in learning both content and language in CLIL contexts.

Tracing a Black Hole: Probing Cosmic Darkness in Anthropocenic Times

In April 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project released an unprecedented image of a supermassive black hole at the centre of galaxy Messier 87. The image, which shows a dark disc outlined by swirling hot gas circling the black hole’s event horizon, exhibits a 55 million-year-old cosmic event in the Virgo galaxy cluster—a void of stellar mass measuring some 6.5 billion times that of our sun. Situated within today’s (Good) Anthropocene scenario, characterized as it is by both the rise of an inhospitable planet but also a range of good vibes and affirmative mantras, this tracing explores this newly “discovered” black hole in terms of the unthinkable questions and speculative trajectories it raises for education and its futures. Through a series of forays into astrophysics, historical examples of cosmic imaging, and further exploration of the image created by EHT, this tracing outlines the black hole and its apparent horizons in order to propose a strange vantage point from which pedagogical problem-posing might be interrupted, mutated, and relaunched. By turning to that which lies outside of the traditional science classroom—beyond the school, beyond curriculum, indeed, beyond the planet itself—this tracing seeks to probe this black hole event in terms of its weird and weirding pedagogical trajectories so as to speculate on unthought possibilities for resituating (science) education in the age of the Anthropocene.

Virtual Scaffolded Instruction for Students with Disabilities

The challenges teachers face with virtual learning existed previously but were heightened by the quick move from in-person to virtual learning caused by the pandemic. Researchers have investigated virtual learning for students with disabilities and have made recommendations including supplemental online resources for individualization and incorporating what we know works for students with disabilities, such as explicit instruction and assistive technology. Another recommendation for virtual learning, and the focus of this article, is the use of scaffolding. Since we know scaffolding is a high-leverage practice for students with disabilities, we can take what we know about scaffolding in face-to-face instruction and transform it to work in virtual settings. This article offers vignettes of a science classroom as two teachers plan for scaffolded instruction to support reading, which is critical in science learning.