Hannah and Nicole began work on a collaborative project across four institutions (Middle Tennesse State University, Stony Brook University, and University of Arizona) in the fall of 2019. They have been working diligently to analyze student group data within lecture and discussion settings to aid in their long-term goals of determining how to promote productive discourse in these settings. This first article describes the types of engagement found across the various institutions and provides implications for practice.
You can find the abstract and link to full article below!
Joshua W. Reid, Zubeyde Demet Kirbulut Gunes, Shaghayegh Fateh, Adan Fatima, Michael Macrie-Shuck, Hannah T. Nennig, Fabrizzio Quintanilla, Nicole E. States, Ahmad Syed, Renée Cole, Gregory T. Rushton, Lisa Shah and Vicente Talanquer
Several studies have highlighted the positive effects that active learning may have on student engagement and performance. However, the influence of active learning strategies is mediated by several factors, including the nature of the learning environment and the cognitive level of in-class tasks. These factors can affect different dimensions of student engagement such as the nature of social processing in student groups, how knowledge is used and elaborated upon by students during in-class tasks, and the amount of student participation in group activities. In this study involving four universities in the US, we explored the association between these different dimensions of student engagement and the cognitive level of assigned tasks in five distinct general chemistry learning environments where students were engaged in group activities in diverse ways. Our analysis revealed a significant association between task level and student engagement. Retrieval tasks often led to a significantly higher number of instances of no interaction between students and individualistic work, and a lower number of knowledge construction and collaborative episodes with full student participation. Analysis tasks, on the other hand, were significantly linked to more instances of knowledge construction and collaboration with full group participation. Tasks at the comprehension level were distinctive in their association with more instances of knowledge application and multiple types of social processing. The results of our study suggest that other factors such as the nature of the curriculum, task timing, and class setting may also affect student engagement during group work.