Anouschka van Leeuwen

Supporting teachers in guiding collaborating students

The aim of this study was to examine the effects of teacher supporting tools that present summaries, visualizations, and analyses of student participation and discussion on the way teachers guide collaborating groups of students in a digital learning environment. An experimental set-up was used in which authentic student data was converted to simulation vignettes that participants could interact with, enabling them to act as the teacher. The vignettes contained groups that had a problem concerning participation or discussion. When presented with the supporting tools, teachers and student teachers were better able to spot the problems regarding participation, intervened more often in problematic groups as time progressed, and displayed more specific explanations of their actions. Effects of two learning analytics (LA) tools on teacher behavior are investigated.A unique combination of an experimental set-up with authentic vignettes is used.Teachers show better ability to diagnose problems concerning participation of students.Teachers display more specific explanations of their actions.

Measuring teacher sense making strategies of learning analytics: a case study

ABSTRACT Teacher orchestration of the classroom is a demanding task because of the multitude of activities and the rapid pace at which these activities occur. Teachers must constantly be aware of the activities students engage in and the progress students are making, in order to be able to make informed decisions. Recent years have seen the development of learning analytics (LA) to support teachers, in the form of interfaces that capture and visualise data about learner activities. LA are hypothesised to deliver actionable knowledge, because the provided information would enable teachers to immediately translate the information into concrete intervention of some kind. This paper provides a short discussion of the hypothesised affordances of LA for supporting teachers, and subsequently, a case study is presented in which a teacher’s sense making strategies of LA were investigated within a digital environment, which enabled the teacher to monitor and regulate the activities of five collaborating groups of students. Besides automatically logged teacher behaviour, eye tracking was used to examine eye movements, and cued retrospective reporting was used to evaluate the choices and decisions made by the teacher. The case study is used to discuss directions for future research concerning learning analytics to support teachers.

The Impact of Affect-Aware Support on Learning Tasks that Differ in Their Cognitive Demands

This paper investigates the effect of affect-aware support on learning tasks that differ in their cognitive demands. We conducted a study with the iTalk2learn platform where students are undertaking fractions tasks of varying difficulty and assigned in one of two groups; one group used the iTalk2learn platform that included the affect-aware support, whereas in the other group the affect-aware support was switched off and support was provided based on students’ performance only. We investigated the hypothesis that affect-aware support has a more pronounced effect when the cognitive demands of the tasks are higher. The results suggest that students that undertook the more challenging tasks were significantly more in-flow and less confused in the group where affect-aware support was provided than students who were supported based on their performance only.

Reflections and Review on the Audit Procedure: Guidelines for More Transparency

Arguably, quality assurance is more complicated in qualitative studies than in quantitative studies. Several procedures for quality assurance are available, among which the audit procedure as proposed by Akkerman, Admiraal, Brekelmans, and Oost. In this article, we reflect on this procedure based on our own experiences as well as based on a review of studies in which the audit procedure was employed. More specifically, we discuss (1) the choice for an auditor and the relationship between auditee and auditor and (2) the function of the audit. We propose that future auditees (a) explicitly report on the auditee–auditor relationship, (b) explicitly report on the function of their audit, and (c) have their audit trail documents available for review. With this methodological position paper, we aim to contribute to the current call to make social science studies and their conclusions more transparent and thereby to enhance the quality of qualitative studies.Arguably, quality assurance is more complicated in qualitative studies than in quantitative studies. Several procedures for quality assurance are available, among which the audit procedure as proposed by Akkerman, Admiraal, Brekelmans, and Oost. In this article, we reflect on this procedure based on our own experiences as well as based on a review of studies in which the audit procedure was employed. More specifically, we discuss (1) the choice for an auditor and the relationship between auditee and auditor and (2) the function of the audit. We propose that future auditees (a) explicitly report on the auditee–auditor relationship, (b) explicitly report on the function of their audit, and (c) have their audit trail documents available for review. With this methodological position paper, we aim to contribute to the current call to make social science studies and their conclusions more transparent and thereby to enhance the quality of qualitative studies.

Exploring Students’ Affective States During Learning with External Representations

We conducted a user study that explored the relationship between students’ usage of multiple external representations and their affective states during fractions learning. We use the affective states of the student as a proxy indicator for the ease of reasoning with the representation. Extending existing literature that highlights the advantages of learning with multiple external representations, our results indicate that low-performing students have difficulties in reasoning with representations that do not fully accommodate the fraction as a part-whole concept. In contrast, high-performing students were at ease with a range of representations, including the ones that vaguely involved the fraction as part-whole concept.