Zhu, Gaoxia

Knowledge Building is a pedagogical approach emphasizing students' collective responsibility to continuously improve their community knowledge. Various emotions may arise during Knowledge Building activities because of students’ diverse ideas, theory-building and cognitive disequilibrium and equilibrium. These emotions may differ in inquiry threads at different discourse development levels. An inquiry thread is a sequence of notes addressing the same problem or topic. This study examines the frequency and sequential patterns between undergraduate students’ productive and improvable Knowledge Building inquiry threads recorded in Knowledge Forum. We found that emotions reflected in inquiry threads tend to be self-repeated. A series of positive and negative activating emotions were reflected in productive collaborative inquiry threads, suggesting students engaged in the discussion despite conflicting ideas and various emotions. On the other hand, improvable collaborative inquiry threads displayed activating to deactivating emotion transitions, such as joy to boredom, which shows that students might disengage from the discussion.

Interdisciplinary competence is critical to tackle the issues that cannot be addressed by a single discipline. Existing research indicates that meaningful interdisciplinary collaborative learning can potentially develop interdisciplinary competence. This research designed and implemented macro- and micro-scripts to scaffold university students’ interdisciplinary collaboration and evaluated students’ interdisciplinary competence. Results found that generally, students showed great competence in integrating disciplinary knowledge, a dimension of interdisciplinary competence.

This interventional case study adopted a data-supported reflective assessment (DSRA) design to help pre-service teachers (PTs) engage in effective Knowledge Building (KB) and examined the mechanisms of this design to support PTs’ productive KB discourse. The participants were 80 PTs from two classes taking the same course. Statistical analysis of indices from social network theory and content analysis of the participants’ Knowledge Forum discourse revealed DSRA’s positive influence on PTs’ KB discourse. Thematic analysis of the PTs’ prompt sheets, supplemented by analysis of classroom videos and classroom observations, revealed four mechanisms by which the DSRA fostered PTs’ KB: (1) identifying promising directions for further inquiry; (2) navigating data for extending collective focal ideas; (3) integrating separated keywords and identifying problems for further inquiry; (4) and improving “storylines” in the collective inquiry process and making numerical values meaningful. These findings extend the literature by revealing the mechanisms by which learners engage in productive shared regulation which are crucial for successful inquiry and KB. The findings also have significant implications for teacher educators and researchers seeking to design technology-enhanced learning to develop PTs’ higher-level KB competencies.

Over the past decades, Social Networking Tools (SNT) have been applied in educational settings to support students' engagement in learning communities. Previous studies suggested the positive effects of including students' voices in technological and instructional design. However, educators usually cannot revise the features of SNT as they like, which may limit the possibility of enhancing students' engagement (i.e., cognitive, emotional, and social-behavioral engagement). Therefore, this study explored whether changing SNT technological and instructional design based on students' voices can improve engagement. We developed a photo-sharing web-based SNT and examined whether refining the SNT and instruction design based on students' input would enhance their multifaceted engagement in a learning community. We collected the opinions and feedback from 114 undergraduate students in an environmental psychology course at a private university in the USA using surveys every three weeks. We refined the technological and instructional design accordingly. Students' engagement was measured four times during the semester, and after the semester, nine students were interviewed with regard to how the technological and instructional design changes influenced their engagement. With successive iterations, we found that students' cognitive and emotional engagement significantly improved, while their social-behavioral engagement did not change significantly during the study. Interview results further explained how the design changes influenced students' engagement. The findings suggested soliciting students’ input into SNT technological and instructional design can benefit their engagement in a learning community, while engagement was also influenced by many other factors.

Previous research is replete with evidence that emotions and self-regulation work together to influence learning performance, but distinct trait and state features of emotions and self-regulation are rarely considered. With an analytic sample comprising 9,501 daily diaries from 280 adolescents participating in a self-driven learning program, this study used multilevel modeling to examine how trait and state positive and negative emotions and self-regulation interact to predict adolescents' perceived daily learning progress. Results suggested that daily perceived learning progress was associated with trait and state positive emotions and self-regulation, as well as trait negative emotions. Furthermore, there was a significant positive interaction between state positive emotions and state self-regulation on perceived daily learning progress, such that when adolescents' state self-regulation was higher than usual, their perceived daily learning progress was more sensitive to state positive emotion. Results underscore the importance of enhancing adolescents' self-regulation and positive emotion, and the feasibility of facilitating adolescents' learning even if they are in a state of greater negative emotion.

Introduction Supportive adults are a critical component of effective out-of-school time (OST) youth programs, yet the short-term dynamics that underlie their role are poorly understood. Within GripTape, a US-wide self-driven learning program, we examined if interactions with program-assigned adults (i.e., Champions) correspond with youths' daily psychosocial functioning (i.e., sense of purpose, self-concept clarity, and self-esteem).

Method Participants were 204 North American adolescents (M [SD] = 16.42 [1.18] years; female = 70.1%, male = 25.0%) enrolled in GripTape, a remote OST program that empowers under-resourced teens to pursue their passions for ~10 weeks. During enrollment, youth are given autonomy to structure their learning goals and methods to best match their needs; a stipend of up to 500 USD; and an adult Champion to act as a touchpoint. Data collection consisted of a baseline survey before the program launch and a 5-min survey on each day of enrollment.

Results Across ~70 days, we found that youth reported greater psychosocial functioning on days they reported interacting with their Champion. After controlling for same-day psychosocial functioning, we failed to find evidence that Champion interactions predicted youths' next-day psychosocial functioning.

Conclusion In addition to being among the first studies to investigate the daily benefits of youth-adult interactions within OST programming, this study documents the short-term incremental change that may underlie previous work on OST program outcomes.