Muhsin Menekse

Technology-Enhanced Learning Environments to Support Students' Argumentation

Technology-enhanced learning environments offer a range of features to facilitate active learning through evidence-based argumentation (e.g., Fabos & Young, 1999; Kollar et al., 2005; Marttunen & Laurinen, 2001; Pea, 1994; Roschelle & Pea, 1999; Schellens & Valcke, 2006). This chapter examines the affordances of these environments, the research behind their development, and the expected benefit of technology-enhanced argumentation. We discuss environments specifically developed for science education as well as other environments that have strong relevance for argumentation in science education. We organize our discussion around two main categories of support for argumentation: facilitating collaborative argumentation and facilitating the construction of individual arguments and contributions. After discussing representative features for supporting argumentation within online environments, we discuss the integration of subsets of these features within four environments in alignment with the specific pedagogical goals and theoretical commitments of their developers. Finally, we discuss future directions for research on argumentation and learning in technology-enhanced environments.

Computer Science Teacher Professional Development in the United States: A Review of Studies Published between 2004 and 2014.

While there has been a remarkable interest to make computer science a core K-12 academic subject in the United States, there is a shortage of K-12 computer science teachers to successfully implement computer sciences courses in schools. In order to enhance computer science teacher capacity, training programs have been offered through teacher professional development. In this study, the main goal was to systematically review the studies regarding computer science professional development to understand the scope, context, and effectiveness of these programs in the past decade (2004–2014). Based on 21 journal articles and conference proceedings, this study explored: (1) Type of professional development organization and source of funding, (2) professional development structure and participants, (3) goal of professional development and type of evaluation used, (4) specific computer science concepts and training tools used, (5) and their effectiveness to improve teacher practice and student learning.

Enhancing Instructor-Student and Student-Student Interactions with Mobile Interfaces and Summarization

Educational research has demonstrated that asking students to respond to reflection prompts can increase interaction between instructors and students, which in turn can improve both teaching and learning especially in large classrooms. However, administering an instructor’s prompts, collecting the students’ responses, and summarizing these responses for both instructors and students is challenging and expensive. To address these challenges, we have developed an application called CourseMIRROR (Mobile Insitu Reflections and Review with Optimized Rubrics). CourseMIRROR uses a mobile interface to administer prompts and collect reflective responses for a set of instructorassigned course lectures. After collection, CourseMIRROR automatically summarizes the reflections with an extractive phrase summarization method, using a clustering algorithm to rank extracted phrases by student coverage. Finally, CourseMIRROR presents the phrase summary to both instructors and students to help them understand the difficulties and misunderstandings encountered.

Self-Efficacy and Mobile Learning Technologies: A Case Study of CourseMIRROR

Mobile devices and applications have reshaped daily lives of people of all ages. One outcome of these technologies is increased access to small, powerful computers, wireless communication, and unlimited access to information at any time. These technological innovations are influencing students’ learning outcomes and engagement behaviors in and out of classroom settings as well. Based on these advancements, there is a need for research studies to explore the relationship between students’ self-efficacy beliefs and their learning outcomes in the context of mobile learning technologies. In this chapter, we describe cognitive and motivational outcomes associated with a mobile technology called CourseMIRROR (Mobile In-situ Reflections and Review with Optimized Rubrics). CourseMIRROR was designed to create an interactive environment between students and faculty in college classrooms as it scaffolds students to reflect on their learning experiences while enabling instructors to efficiently monitor students’ reflections to inform instruction. Specifically, we addressed the following research questions in this chapter: (1) Do students with high academic self-efficacy beliefs generate high-quality reflections? (2) To what degree do students’ self-efficacy beliefs and reflection quality scores predict their learning outcomes?

Two Cases Studies of Fifth Grade Students Reasoning About Levers

The purpose of this teaching experiment was to give fifth grade students activities using simple machines to see how they would use proportional reasoning to mathematize those activities. We chose a series of activities using two types of levers, because of their experiences with seesaws and because this combined mathematics with science. We hoped that they would develop models of the lever. We also hoped that they would recognize the inverse multiplicative relationship between distance and weight. The students did demonstrate evidence of preliminary models about the relationship between weights and distances on a lever. On the final day, the students, in a thought experiment, were able to discover the multiplicative relationship between distance and weight, but they did not realize the inverse nature of this relationship.