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Examining learning outcomes and engagement in online peer assessment: the impact of social network prestige among teacher-learners
Interactive Learning Environments
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IntroductionThe social distancing restrictions due to the COVID-19 pandemic have changed students’ learning environment and limited their social interactions. Therefore, the objective of this study was to investigate the influence of the social distancing restrictions on students’ social networks, wellbeing, and academic performance.Methods
We performed a questionnaire study in which 102 students participated before and 167 students during the pandemic. They completed an online questionnaire about how they formed their five peer social networks (study-related support, collaboration, friendship, share information, and learn-from) out-of-class. We performed social network analysis to compare the sizes, structures, and compositions of students’ five social networks before and during the pandemic, between first- and second-year students, and between international and domestic students. Additionally, we performed Kruskal–Wallis H test to compare students’ academic performance before and during the pandemic. We performed thematic analysis to answers for two open-end questions in the online questionnaire to explore what difficulties students encountered during the COVID-19 pandemic and what support they needed.ResultsThe results showed that the size of students’ social networks during the pandemic was significantly smaller than before the pandemic. Besides, the formation of social networks differed between first- and second-year students, and between domestic and international students. However, academic performance did not decline during the COVID-19 pandemic. Furthermore, we identified three key areas in which students experienced difficulties and needed support by thematic analysis: social connections and interactions, learning and studying, and physical and mental wellbeing.Conclusion
When institutions implement learning with social distancing, such as online learning, they need to consider changes in students’ social networks and provide appropriate support.
Online collaborative learning is implemented extensively in higher education. Nevertheless, it remains challenging to help learners achieve high-level group performance, knowledge elaboration, and socially shared regulation in online collaborative learning. To cope with these challenges, this study proposes and evaluates a novel automated assessment and feedback approach that is based on knowledge graph and artificial intelligence technologies. Following a quasi-experimental design, we assigned a total of 108 college students into two conditions: an experimental group that participated in online collaborative learning and received automated assessment and feedback from the tool, and a control group that participated in the same collaborative learning activities without automated assessment and feedback. Analyses of quantitative and qualitative data indicated that the introduced automated assessment and feedback significantly promoted group performance, knowledge elaboration, and socially shared regulation of collaborative learning. The proposed knowledge graph-based automated assessment and feedback approach shows promise in providing a valuable tool for researchers and practitioners to support online collaborative learning.
Peer assessment has traditionally represented a key tool to enhance active learning and critical thinking. However, the success of this approach is governed by different factors, which have been accentuated in recent years. The implementation of peer assessment is consequently a challenging task in the current context. This work investigates peer assessment strategies in seven Computer Engineering courses. Students’ performance and assessment accuracy are analyzed throughout five academic years, covering the transition from offline to online methodologies according to the evolution of educational environments. More specifically, peer and lecturer’s grades are examined to identify correlations or deviations in two execution phases. The first phase involves the analysis of in-class offline peer assessments during four academic years, integrated as part of continuous assessment tasks. The second phase deals with the evaluation of online peer assessments in 2021/2022, considering different platforms to manage submissions and reviews. The offline experience denotes statistical correlations between the grades assigned by the peers and the lecturer, while also revealing patterns that affected the performance of students. In addition, the switch to online methodologies does not significantly affect the assessments in courses that adopted peer strategies in the past. Finally, comparable results are obtained under single-blind and double-blind models after careful training.
This study examines the influence of students’ individual attitude and social interactions on participation in collaborative and gamified online learning activities, as well as the influence of participating in those activities on students’ online class- and test-related emotions. Based on a sample of 301 first year Economics and Law university students and using the Partial Least Squares-Structural Equation Modelling approach, all the relationships among first-order and second-order constructs included in the model are validated. The results support all the hypotheses studied, confirming the positive relationship that both students’ individual attitude and social interactions have on participation in collaborative and gamified online learning activities. The results also show that participating in those activities is positively related with class- and test-related emotions. The main contribution of the study is the validation of the effect of collaborative and gamified online learning on university students’ emotional well-being through the analysis of their attitude and social interactions. Moreover, this is the first time in the specialised learning literature that students’ attitude is considered as a second-order construct operationalised by three factors: the perceived usefulness that this digital resource brings to the students, the entertainment that this digital resource brings to the students, and the predisposition to use this digital resource among all those available in online training. Our findings aim to shed light for educators when preparing and designing computer mediated and online teaching programs that seek to generate positive emotions as a motivation for students.
Collaborative learning (CL) is widely used in higher education around the world because it is associated with increases in students’ knowledge and social skills. Low student engagement in CL activities has been identified as a common issue, while there is no CL-specific engagement scale to measure and understand engagement in such settings. Additionally, although western countries have been investigating student engagement since the 1950s, there have been comparatively few studies of this important construct in China. To address these imbalances, the present paper adopted a mixed methods approach to developing and validating a Chinese CL engagement scale. In the quantitative study, Chinese university students ( N = 405) completed an anonymous online survey to assess their engagement in CL activities. Results from exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses supported a hierarchical (second-order) three-factor model of student engagement (behavioural, cognitive and emotional engagement), consistent with the tripartite conception of student engagement in Western countries. Participants were further divided into three unique groups based on engagement scores, and in the qualitative study, 12 participants from three groups were interviewed about CL experiences. Interviews served to further validate the quantitative results. The significance, limitations, and implications of these findings are discussed.
This research aimed to explore (1) the characteristics and patterns of student interactions on online discussion boards throughout a course using social network analysis (SNA) and (2) the mediating effect of social presence, as the underlying mechanism, on the relationship between these interactions and students' learning outcomes. Eighty-four college students from four classes of a single course responded to an online survey asking about their perceptions of social presence, perceived learning achievement , and course satisfaction. Students' discussion threads were analyzed using SNA. The results confirmed that social presence mediates relationships between interaction measures and learning outcomes. This research also found that SNA can be a useful tool to monitor the dynamic characteristics and patterns of online discussion interactions among students and support instructors to implement immediate and relevant instruction.
The rise of teacher training in online interactive learning environments has contributed to teachers’ professional development and brought new vitality to the informatisation of education. Many researchers have reported that there is a participation gap in online interactive learning environments. Research on the factors influencing this is very important. Social network prestige, which measures the degree to which learners gain peer attention in directed social networks, is one of the important metrics to characterise the participation gap. In this study, we offered an online teacher training course, and 1438 in-service teachers from primary and secondary schools attended. Among them, we selected 457 in-service teachers who participated in the three peer assessment activities as the final participants. To analyse the factors influencing learners’ social network prestige in online peer assessment, we first conducted a partial least squares structural equation modelling analysis to construct a model of factors influencing social network prestige. Then, we adopted several semi-structured interviews to investigate learners' perspectives to provide an in-depth analysis of the factors influencing social network prestige. The purpose of this study was to gain insight into the participation gap in online interactions and make effective suggestions on how to improve learning performance in online peer assessment. Implications for practice or policy: Course designers could improve the design of the introduction to peer assessment to motivate learners and enhance their acceptance of the activities. Course designers could reduce participation gap by assigning work from low-prestige learners to high-prestige learners in a non-mandatory way later in the course.
From the perspective of service science and its core concept of value co-creation, promoting learner engagement is critical for learning outcomes in a non-formal online learning environment. To promote online learning performance, we study how multidimensional learner engagement affects both instrumental and experiential learning outcomes. By incorporating the service-dominant logic perspective into the research model, we designed an online survey to investigate the impact of platform value co-creation on learners’ engagement outcomes. By employing a partial least squares-structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM), the results show that behavioral engagement, cognitive engagement, and emotional engagement have a significant impact on learning outcomes through the mediating effect of platform value, a second-order hierarchical latent variable. This study has multiple theoretical contributions and practical implications. First, we found new evidence that pursuing good learning outcomes in a non-formal online learning setting is not just a technological architecture or pedagogic guidelines, but also a “win–win” value co-creation process. Second, our results confirm the posited direct and indirect effects, thus evidencing functional value, emotional value, social value, and personalized value as components of the platform value construct, and it as a driver and mediator for better online learning outcomes. Third, our results underscore the importance of platform value in studying the impact of learner engagement on learning outcomes and provide a sharper theoretical lens to evaluate online learning platform value from the perspective of online learners.
Peer assessment (PA) is employed as one fundamental practice of classroom-based assessment in terms of its learning-oriented and formative nature. The exercise of peer assessment has multiple and additional benefits for student learning. However, research into the learning processes in peer assessment is scarce both in theory and in practice, making it difficult to evaluate and pinpoint its value as a tool in assessment as learning (AaL). This study focuses both on the learning process and outcome through assessment activities. We set out with three goals in mind: (1) to examine students' assessment performance in context, (2) to evaluate its impact on student progress, and (3) to illuminate teachers on organizing assessment activities. Three specific research questions are answered in this study: (1) How do student raters perform in the process of PA in an advanced English class? (2) To what extent do assessment activities influence the students' speaking ability? (3) What are students' perceptions of PA regarding its benefits and caveats? A total of 29 undergraduate students participated in two assessment activities on argumentative speaking. Many-Facet Rasch Model analysis was conducted to measure the rater effects both at the group level and the individual level. Bias/interaction analyses were performed to diagnose rater behavior in different contexts including the rating session, speaking session, and peer assessment vs. self-assessment. Questionnaire and semi-structured interview data were also collected to explore factors and strategies that could interfere with PA as AaL. Results show that students exhibited stable rating behavior and made progress in argumentative speaking in all dimensions, including delivery, organization, and language use. They are more stringent with themselves than with peers although there is one rare case with a bias against peers. Participants acknowledged the benefits of PA but also shared reasonable concerns in practice. This study validated the feasibility and the effectiveness of PA for student learning. Discussion on findings and guidelines for effective implementation of PA as AaL are provided.
p>Students’ argumentation performance can be influenced by their epistemic beliefs, however, in the context of argumentative essay writing and argumentative peer feedback in online setting this has not been clearly investigated. This study explores relationship between students’ epistemic beliefs and argumentation performance regarding essay writing and peer feedback. In total, 101 undergraduate students filled out the epistemic beliefs survey and wrote an argumentative essay. Then, they provided two sets of feedback on the essays of their peers and finally submitted their revised essays. Students’ beliefs about the Internet-specific justification of knowledge did not play a significant role in their argumentation performance in essay writing, while it was related to their constructive peer feedback performance. Students’ beliefs about the nature of scientific knowledge were significantly related to their argumentative essay writing and peer feedback performance. In terms of uptake of peer feedback, no significant role was found for epistemic beliefs.</p
Online peer assessment has been widely applied in online teacher training. However, not all learners participate equally, detailed characterization and impact analysis of peer assessment is required. This study draws on a sociological term, social network prestige, to evaluate the participation gap of learners in online peer assessment. A teacher training course was offered to in-service primary and secondary school teachers, and 457 participants were ranked according to their prestige. Then, the top 30% of learners were considered the high-prestige group (142 participants) and the bottom 30% as the low-prestige group (128 participants). Social network analysis and behavioral sequence analysis were used to explore the differences in the learning outcomes of these two groups. The results showed significant differences in learning performance, social network structure and learning behaviors among learners with different prestige. High-prestige learners have better learning performance and are affected by their prior knowledge. Learners with different levels of prestige differ in social network structure and learning behavior. Based on these findings, this study suggests improvements to reduce the participation gap.
Misalignment between students' communal values and those expressed in classrooms is an obstacle to academic engagement, especially in mathematics, and especially for racial ethnic minority and female students. Using 10 schools across the United States, we conducted a longitudinal field study in 8th grade mathematics classes to investigate: (a) how perceptions of communally oriented classrooms influence student outcomes in early adolescence, (b) what psychological processes mediate these relations, and (c) whether the influence of perceived communal practices in classrooms have similar or different effects on students with varying social identities based on race, ethnicity, and gender. Results showed that middle school classes that emphasize communality (both social relevance of math and peer collaboration) significantly predicted stronger math self-concept, more behavioral engagement, and better performance in math. These associations were mediated through three psychological processes-belonging, challenge, and self-efficacy. Among racial ethnic minority adolescents, feelings of belonging and challenge in math class were key psychological processes that enhanced math learning outcomes. These processes were activated when classes connected communal values to math. Finally, communal learning contexts benefited girls and boys equally. In sum, communal values practiced by emphasizing social relevance of academic content and using collaborative learning practices engage all students, especially students of color, at a formative period of academic learning in mathematics. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).
It has become necessary to monitor the change in learners' skills during the education carried out in electronic environments. In this study, pre-service teachers made a presentation in their teaching practice, and a formative assessment was given to ensure active participation of the observer pre-service teachers in the online peer assessment process. The observer pre-service teachers were asked to evaluate their peers'
performances using a rubric. Based on the quantitative data collected and analyzed, questions about the experiences of the participants were created, and the opinions of the participants were obtained through e-mail. The research findings were obtained through the sequential explanatory mixed method. The study revealed that the observer preservice teachers could evaluate different performances consistently. The research also showed that the validity of the assessments was significantly low especially in the evaluation of low and medium level performances. The qualitative findings confirmed the quantitative findings.
Understanding the proactive roles of receivers in peer feedback processes is crucial because proactive recipience carries great potential in enhancing the effectiveness of feedback and supporting self-regulated (SRL) and co-regulated learning (CoRL). However, receiver's proactivity has been insufficiently explored and the field lacks a clear understanding of how peer feedback receivers could aid academic self-regulation and co-regulation. This study unpacks the black box through examining different receiver roles in peer feedback dialogue and receiver-triggered SRL and CoRL behaviours in an undergraduate writing course for first-year English majors in China. Data were collected through audio-taped peer feedback dialogue, stimulated recall interviews and journals. Findings revealed a variety of increasingly active receiver roles: respondent, verifier, explicator, negotiator, seeker and generator. Assuming these roles, receivers not only regulated their own learning by self-monitoring works, evaluating the quality of received comments and co-producing feedback but also improved feedback providers' writing and evaluative skills. The study challenges the stereotypical image of passive receivers and argues that receiver proactivity could turn peer feedback into a mutually beneficial learning activity for receivers and providers. Implications for developing receiver proactivity are discussed.
In higher educational institutes, developing classrooms for active learning is becoming a part of comprehensive educational drive for students involving and engaging in learning. For this purpose, influence of social factors on collaborative learning and engagement has been investigated which will influence learning performance of students. The study looked at following areas: (a) the ability of social factors for developing collaborative learning and engagement and (b) whether collaborative learning and engagement mediate a link between social factors and student’s learning performance. Constructivism theory has been utilized to observe the student’s learning behavior. Data have been collected through questionnaires from university students. Findings evaluated through structural equation modeling (SEM), shows that social factors, i.e. interaction with peers and teachers, social presence, and usage of social media positively impact active collaborative learning and student involvement, thus affecting their learning performance. The findings also provide evidence for double mediation used in this study. As online learning is becoming more prevalent in education, it has been concluded that overall collaborative learning and engagement with influence of social factors improve activities of students learning; therefore, their usage should be stimulated in teaching and learning in higher educational institutions as it influences students’ academic development.
This paper presents the findings of a four-year mainly qualitative study of peer and self-assessment in university teaching. Peer and self-assessment activities were introduced with the intention of supporting students’ learning, but they also formed part of the formal grading of the course assignment. Thus, the research aimed to explore the students’ experiences with these activities in this specific learning situation – which benefits they perceived from these activities, what challenges they faced, and what supported their learning. The students completed the survey after participating in the activities, but before receiving their grades and peer feedback so as to capture their authentic experiences with the activities. A total of 103 students completed the survey. The data were analysed using descriptive statistics and thematic analysis. The results indicate that despite being stressful and uncomfortable for many, peer assessment was more beneficial for the students’ learning than self-assessment. The students expressed concerns related to their competence to grade and responsibility for their peers’ grades. However, by addressing students’ needs for autonomy, competence and relatedness, these initial worries can be transformed into drivers for learning. It may be concluded that peer assessment can play a role in supporting students to self-assess.
Prestige-biased social learning occurs when individuals preferentially learn from others who are highly respected, admired, copied, or attended to in their group. This form of social learning is argued to reflect novel forms of social hierarchy in human societies, and, by providing an efficient short-cut to acquiring adaptive information, underpin the cumulative cultural evolution that has contributed to our species’ ecological success. Despite these potentially important consequences, little empirical work to date has tested the basic predictions of prestige-biased social learning. Here we provide evidence supporting the key predictions that prestige-biased social learning is used when it constitutes an indirect cue of success, and when success-biased social learning is unavailable. We ran an online experiment (n = 269) in which participants could copy each other in real-time to score points on a general-knowledge quiz. Our implementation of ‘prestige’ was the number of times someone had previously been copied by others. Importantly, prestige was an emergent property of participants’ behaviour during the experiment; no deception or manipulation of prestige was employed at any time. We found that, as predicted, participants used prestige-biased social learning when the prestige cue was an indirect cue of success, and when direct success information was unavailable. This highlights how people flexibly and adaptively employ social learning strategies based on the reliability of the information that such strategies provide.
Feedback has a powerful influence on learning. However, feedback practices in higher education often fail to produce the expected impact on learning. This is mainly because of its implementation as a one-way transmission of diagnostic information where students play a passive role as the information receivers. Dialogue around feedback can enhance students’ sense making from feedback and capacities to act on it. Yet, dialogic feedback has been mostly implemented as an instructor-led activity, which is hardly affordable in large classrooms. Dialogic peer feedback can offer a scalable solution; however, current practices lack a systematic design, resulting in low learning gains. Attending to this gap, this paper presents a theoretical framework that structures dialogic feedback as a three-phase collaborative activity, involving different levels of regulation: first, planning and coordination of feedback activities (involving socially shared regulation), second, feedback discussion to support its uptake (involving co-regulation), and last, translation of feedback into task engagement and progress (involving self-regulation). Based on the framework, design guidelines are provided to help practitioners shape their feedback practices. The application of the principles is illustrated through an example scenario. The framework holds great potential to promote student-centred approaches to feedback practices in higher education.
Competent use of the Internet to locate information is an important skill for today’s youth. Yet, many lack the knowledge and dispositions to engage in the processes necessary to effectively and efficiently find information on the Internet. As a result, various countries have incorporated references to the processes of online inquiry within their educational standards. Despite similarities in these standards, however, international comparisons are rare and have not produced insights into broader themes and patterns regarding how cognitive, metacognitive, and affective variables interact to influence outcomes on related measures of success, e.g., international assessments. The purpose of this research was two-fold: to examine the measurement invariance of a German-language version of the Survey of Online Reading Attitudes and Behaviors across a sample of participants from Germany and to compare the results with students from United States who completed the English-version of SORAB. The results justified comparisons across the samples with respect to the latent factor variables and comparisons yielded differences associated with cognitive and behavioral engagement, value/interest, and anxiety. No differences were noted with regard to self-regulation and efficacy for online reading. Implications are framed within broader contextual variables that may have been influential in producing the differences between the samples.
Positive student attitude towards peer assessment can be demonstrated through high-quality peer assessment activities. Research findings on students’ attitudes before and after such activities were mixed. This study was conducted using a mixed-methods approach to investigate the underlying factors influencing students’ attitude change. Participants were students enrolled in an online graduate-level assessment course in the college of education in a university in the southeast United States in the fall of 2017 (N = 31). Surveys and interviews were used to collect quantitative and qualitative data separately, both of which indicated that perceived accurate and specific feedback tended to help students shift to more positive attitudes towards online peer assessment. In addition, final task score improvement after the activity was correlated with positive attitude change. Qualitative results also identified other factors, such as communication with the peers’ work and logistic concerns. The current study offers insights for researchers and instructors to promote positive attitude changes in online peer assessment activities.
Measures of social network position provide unique social and relational information yet have not been used extensively by researchers who study peer relationships. This study explored two measures—social network prestige and social network centrality—to improve conceptualization of their similarities, differences, and meaning within a peer relationships context. Prestige and centrality were computed from friendship nominations (N = 396 6th graders; 48% girls; 49% White) and participants nominated peers on several social indicators (e.g., aggressive, popular). Two example classroom networks were examined to visually depict social network position. Associations between measures of social network position and social indicators were examined using correlations and latent profile analysis. Latent profile analysis identified three profiles based on the social indicators, which differentially related to prestige and centrality. Overall, prestigious youth were generally well-liked, prosocial, and leaders, whereas central youth were powerful and aggressive. The results strengthen the conceptualization of these network-based measures, allowing them to be more readily used by peer relationships researchers to understand youth’s interaction patterns and behaviors.
Lay Description
What is already known about this topic: Social interaction is important for learning, and asynchronous online discussions are broadly used to support social learning.
Teaching practices and strategies have been developed to support student participation in online discussions.
In some contexts, participation intensity predicts learning performance.
However, researchers have documented a participation gap in online discussions.
What this paper adds: We applied prestige, a sociological term, to a study of the participation gap in an online undergraduate class and revealed varied levels of prestige among students.
Lower prestige students were not inactive; rather, they initiated an equivalent volume of connections with peers but were often ignored.
The timing of discussion participation can be a probable contributor to the gap, as lower prestige students' participation was less timely and more compressed together.
Implications for practice and/or policy: Pedagogical supports are needed to help students develop advanced self‐regulation skills conducive to productive discussion participation.
The design of online discussion environments and analytics tools needs to consider students' discussion dispositions and behaviours.
Despite the wide use of peer assessment, questions about the helpfulness of peer feedback are frequently raised. In particular, it is unknown whether, how and to what extent peer feedback can help solve problems in initial texts in complex writing tasks. We investigated this research gap by focusing on the case of writing literature reviews in an academic writing course. The dataset includes two drafts from 21 students, sampled to represent a wide range of document qualities, and 84 anonymous peer reviews, involving 1,289 idea units. Our study revealed that: (1) at both substance and high prose levels, drafts of all quality levels demonstrated more common problems on advanced writing issues (e.g. counter-argument); (2) peer feedback was driven by difficulty of the problem rather than overall draft quality, peer comments were not well aligned with the relative frequency of problems, more comments were given to less difficult problems; (3) peer feedback had a moderate impact on revision, and importantly, receiving multiple comments on the same issue led to more repairs and improvement of draft quality, but consistent with the comments received, authors tended to fix basic problems more often. Implications for practice and research are drawn from these findings.
As the number of participants in online distance learning courses increases, peer assessment is becoming a popular strategy for evaluating open assignments and for breaking the social isolation surrounding distance education. Yet, the quality and characteristics of peer assessment in massive online courses has received little attention. Hence, this study was set to examine peer feedback quality and grading accuracy in a project-based course. The study applied a sequential exploratory mixed methods design. It included 339 participants who studied the same engineering course, but in three different modes: on-campus (n = 77), small private online course (n = 110), and massive open online course (MOOC) (n = 152). Content analysis of feedback comments identified four categories: reinforcement, statement, verification and elaboration, arranged in an ascending scale of cognitive ability. The findings indicated that the MOOC participants provided more feedback comments and volunteered to assess more projects than their counterparts did. However, the on-campus students provided higher quality feedback and their peer grading was better correlated with the grades assigned by the teaching assistants.
Although peer assessment is widely implemented in higher education, not all students are highly engaged in it. To enhance student engagement in peer assessment, we designed and developed a web-based tool, autonomy-supportive peer assessment (ASPA), to support students’ need for autonomy when they conducted peer assessment. Students’ sense of autonomy, and their behavioral, emotional, and cognitive engagement in peer assessment were examined via interviews and surveys. We also examined students’ academic performances, including their improvement from initial to revised essays and the quality of feedback they provided. Survey results indicated that the ASPA group (1) experienced a slightly higher sense of autonomy than the non-ASPA group, and (2) spent much more time on each evaluation criterion than the non-ASPA group. Interviews suggested that both the ASPA and non-ASPA groups were engaged in peer assessment. However, there were no statistically significant differences between the two groups in behavioral, emotional, cognitive engagement, and academic performances.
This study was designed to investigate the student teachers perceptions about and benefits and challenges of using Facebook as an online peer assessment tool for the student teachers’ works. The study group included 24 student teachers in science education department of a state university located in the southeast region of Turkey. A case study approach of the qualitative method was employed in the research. Semi-structured interviews were conducted to collect the data. The interviews were audio recorded, and records of all the interviews were transcribed into full text in Turkish. Collected data were analyzed using an emergent coding approach. Codes, then, were categorized to constitute themes and subthemes. The findings indicated that the student teachers were able to give objective feedback on their peers’ work and engaged more actively in class after participating in online peer assessment. Additionally, the students found it exciting and productive to use Facebook as a peer assessment tool in their learning.
This study explored relations between social network characteristics in an online graduate class and two learning outcomes: affective and cognitive learning. The social network analysis data were compiled by entering the number of one-to-one postings sent by each student to each other student in a course web site discussion space into a specially designed spreadsheet. Regression analysis revealed that both network prestige and network centrality were robust predictors of cognitive learning outcomes. Self-reported affective learning, however, was not related to network factors. Results illustrate the utility of social network analysis in understanding interaction and learning outcomes in online classes.
Social learning (learning from others) is evolutionarily adaptive under a wide range of conditions and is a long-standing area of interest across the social and biological sciences. One social-learning mechanism derived from cultural evolutionary theory is prestige bias, which allows a learner in a novel environment to quickly and inexpensively gather information as to the potentially best teachers, thus maximizing his or her chances of acquiring adaptive behavior. Learners provide deference to high-status individuals in order to ingratiate themselves with, and gain extended exposure to, that individual. We examined prestige-biased social transmission in a laboratory experiment in which participants designed arrowheads and attempted to maximize hunting success, measured in caloric return. Our main findings are that (1) participants preferentially learned from prestigious models (defined as those models at whom others spent longer times looking), and (2) prestige information and success-related information were used to the same degree, even though the former was less useful in this experiment than the latter. We also found that (3) participants were most likely to use social learning over individual (asocial) learning when they were performing poorly, in line with previous experiments, and (4) prestige information was not used more often following environmental shifts, contrary to predictions. These results support previous discussions of the key role that prestige-biased transmission plays in social learning.
The use of peer assessment (PA) as an alternative form of evaluation method is reported to be helpful in learning and is increasingly
being adopted in higher education settings. Through collecting data from 280 university students in Taiwan, a 20-item instrument
was developed to investigate university students’ attitudes toward and perceptions of PA and online PA. Four subscales, Positive
Attitudes, Online Attitudes, Understanding-and-Action, and Negative Attitudes, were extracted and reliabilities were calculated.
Results revealed that participating students held positive attitudes toward the use of PA activities, but they viewed online
PA as a technical tool to facilitate assessment processes, rather than as a learning aid. Male students had more positive
attitudes toward PA than females did, and students with previous PA experiences had less negative attitudes toward PA. A majority
of these students suggested that the PA score should be counted as a small part of the total course grade, and there was an
effect of the perceived importance of PA score on students’ attitudes toward these four subscales.
To address the limitation of lacking interactivity in conventional peer assessment, this study proposed an interactive peer assessment approach and examined its effectiveness in an undergraduate course for preservice teachers (PSTs). Seventy-two PSTs were randomly assigned to the interactive or conventional group. The results indicated that the interactive group outperformed the conventional group with regard to technology-enhanced learning design skills, feedback quality and feedback uptake. Furthermore, feedback uptake was identified as a mediating factor to the effectiveness of the interactive approach. The study advocates for the integration of an interactive peer assessment approach into future online teacher educational settings.
Collaborative problem-solving (CPS) has significantly affected people's working patterns and lifestyles and has become a critical competency in economies and society. CPS competency is widely recognised as an essential skill in the 21st century and has been extensively considered in teaching and learning practices. Although various factors influencing CPS have been identified, the effect of group work on students’ CPS competency is still to be determined. In this study, we systematically reviewed the published literature from 2013 to 2022 and explored the association between students’ roles in group work and the development of CPS in the learning process. We analysed 36 relevant empirical studies using the developed framework. The factors influencing group dynamics and performance, including students’ backgrounds, subjects, collaborative learning modes, role types, and CPS dimensions, were coded and analysed. We found that a student's role (scripted vs. emergent) was fluid and subject to change during group work, contributing to CPS development (social vs. cognitive process skills). We also found that this effect was conditioned/mediated by student characteristics, learning contexts, and teacher support. Teachers can, therefore, promote students’ CPS development by monitoring the roles performed throughout group tasks and providing guidance specific to students’ roles in their learning.
Although the potential of group awareness (GA) tools on triggering student engagement has been recognized in literature, little is known about the effects of GA tools on student engagement with peer feedback in the context of online collaborative language learning. This quasi-experimental study with 86 college students explored how GA tools influenced student engagement with peer feedback in an authentic learning environment. The results showed that GA tools had positive effects on students’ behavioral engagement. The analysis of dynamic engagement progression across three rounds of peer assessment revealed that GA tools helped stimulate and sustain students’ continuous cognitive engagement in providing both surface-level and meaning-level feedback. However, GA tools had limited effects on triggering cognitive engagement in incorporating peer feedback into revisions, especially at the late stage of the learning activity. Additionally, the students supported by GA tools demonstrated higher emotional engagement than those without access to GA information but the difference was not statistically significant. Findings of this study provide important insights on using GA tools to enhance student engagement with online peer feedback in collaborative language learning activities.
Peer evaluations for nearly 1,650 students in three different team-based learning economics courses are analyzed for evidence of gender differences in ratings given and received. The analysis controls for general academic skills and economics-specific skills as well as other individual and team characteristics. Females earn higher evaluations than males in introductory and intermediate-level microeconomic theory courses even when conditioning on achievement, but there is no statistically significant difference in a more advanced course. Finally, there is little evidence of gender bias in evaluations given; both males and females rate female teammates higher than male teammates.
In this study, an integrated collaborative learning and knowledge map approach was developed for online teacher professional development. An online teacher education environment based on that approach was constructed. To investigate the interaction between the knowledge map and collaborative learning strategies on teachers’ learning performance and self-efficacy of group learning, a 2 × 2 experiment was acted out. The study subjects were 179 in-service teachers from primary schools in China. The participants were divided into four groups to learn theories and cases of educational research methods using different online learning strategies (individual learning or collaborative learning) and knowledge map strategies (using a knowledge map or not). The results revealed two notable findings. First, both the knowledge map and collaborative learning strategies were significantly conducive to enhance the teachers’ learning performance. Second, the interaction between the two kinds of strategies showed that the knowledge map strategy was potential to promote the self-efficacy of group learning among teachers who used the collaborative learning strategy. Thus, we conclude that the collaborative construction of group knowledge map could be an effective approach to promote teachers’ knowledge construction and provide visual interaction support for teachers’ online professional development.
While the past few decades have witnessed enormous growth in research on peer feedback in second and foreign language (L2) writing, little attention has been paid to student engagement with peer feedback. Drawing on multiple methodologies, we explored how 21 university EFL students engaged with peer feedback on L2 writing affectively, behaviorally, and cognitively. We collected multiple sources of data, including audio-recorded peer feedback sessions, students’ composition drafts, written peer feedback, semi-structured interviews, and a questionnaire survey. Findings showed that student engagement with peer feedback differed depending on the type of feedback. Overall, students had positive affective engagement and extensive behavioral and cognitive engagement with the form-focused feedback but showed a tendency of low cognitive and behavioral engagement with the content-focused feedback. Additionally, the study revealed a complex relationship within the sub-constructs of and among the three engagement dimensions, manifested in the form of interconnectedness and inconsistencies. We discuss pedagogical implications about how to enhance student engagement with peer feedback.
Cambridge Core - Research Methods in Sociology and Criminology - Exploratory Social Network Analysis with Pajek - by Wouter De Nooy
Peer assessment has been widely applied to actively engage students in learning to write. However, sometimes students resist peer assessment. This study explores reviewers’ attitudes and other underlying factors that influence students’ participation in online peer assessment. Participants were 234 Chinese undergraduates from two different academic backgrounds: engineering majors (n = 168) and English majors (n = 66). Gender, academic background and prior experience with peer assessment were all related to participation levels. Moreover, factor analyses revealed three attitudinal factors: (1) positive attitude (a general endorsement of the benefits of peer assessment), (2) interpersonal negative (concerns about the negative effects on interpersonal relationships), and (3) procedural negative (doubts about the procedural rationality of peer assessment). Among the attitudinal factors, procedural negative was negatively associated with participation, as expected. Interestingly, interpersonal negative was associated with greater participation, and positive attitude was associated with lower participation, in part because students worked hard on each review rather than doing many reviews superficially. Implications for instruction are discussed.
The term ‘peer assessment’ may apply to a range of student activities. This imprecision may impact on the uptake of peer assessment pedagogies. To better describe peer assessment approaches, typologies of peer assessment diversity were previously derived from the education literature. However, these typologies have not yet been tested with ‘real-life’ peer assessment examples, nor do they consider broader contextual matters. We present an augmented peer assessment framework, refined through analysing faculty accounts of their peer assessment practices. Our framework subsumes previous attempts to classify peer assessment, and extends them to include technology use, resources and policy, which were new features of our data not present in previous frameworks. In the current higher education climate, these considerations may be crucial for the scalability and success of peer assessment. The framework proposed in this paper provides both precision and concision for researchers and educators in studying and implementing peer assessment.
Many aspects of higher education must be reconceptualised for massive open online courses (MOOCs). Formative and summative assessment of qualitative work in particular requires novel approaches to cope with the numbers involved. Peer review has been proposed as one solution, and has been widely adopted by major MOOC providers, but there is currently little evidence about whether it is appropriate or under what conditions. Here, we examine student participation, performance and opinions of a peer review task in a biomedical science MOOC. We evaluate data from approximately 200 student topic summaries and 300 qualitative peer reviews of those summaries, and compare these to student demographic data (gender, age, employment status, education, national language) and to performance in multiple choice tests. We show that higher performance in the written topic summary correlated with both higher participation in the peer review task and with writing higher quality peer reviews. Qualitative analysis of s...
The concept of school engagement has attracted increasing attention as representing a possible antidote to declining academic motivation and achievement. Engagement is presumed to be malleable, responsive to contextual features, and amenable to environmental change. Researchers describe behavioral, emotional, and cognitive engagement and recommend studying engagement as a multifaceted construct. This article reviews definitions, measures, precursors, and outcomes of engagement; discusses limitations in the existing research; and suggests improvements. The authors conclude that, although much has been learned, the potential contribution of the concept of school engagement to research on student experience has yet to be realized. They call for richer characterizations of how students behave, feel, and think—research that could aid in the development of finely tuned interventions
The Sage handbook of social network analysis
- J Mclevey
- J Scott
- P J Carrington
- McLevey J.
Motivation and self-regulated learning: Theory, research, and applications
- B J Zimmerman
- D H Schunk
- Zimmerman B. J.