Zhu, Gaoxia

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.

The significance of interdisciplinary learning has been well-recognized by higher education institutions. However, when teaching interdisciplinary learning to junior undergraduate students, their limited disciplinary knowledge and underrepresentation of students from some disciplines can hinder their learning performance. ChatGPT’s ability to engage in human-like conversations and massive knowledge grounded in different disciplines holds promise in enriching undergraduate students with the disciplinary knowledge that they lack. In this exploratory study, we engaged 130 undergraduate students in a three-condition quasi-experiment to examine how ChatGPT influences their demonstrated and perceived interdisciplinary learning quality, as measured by their online posts and surveys, respectively. The content analysis results show that overall, students’ online posts could be coded into four interdisciplinary learning dimensions: diversity, disciplinary grounding, cognitive advancement, and integration. The means of the first three dimensions were close to the middle level (ranging from 0.708 to 0.897, and the middle level is 1), whereas the mean score of integration was relatively small (i.e., 0.229). Students under the ChatGPT condition demonstrated improved disciplinary grounding. Regarding their perceived interdisciplinary learning quality, we did not find significant differences across the three conditions in the pre- or post-surveys. The findings underscore ChatGPT’s ability to enhance students’ disciplinary grounding and the significance of further fostering their integration skills.

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.

Background

Social annotation has emerged as a promising educational technology that fosters collaborative reading and discussion of digital resources among learners. While the positive impact of social annotation on students' learning process and performance is widely acknowledged, students' behavioural patterns in social annotation are underexplored.

Objectives

This study investigated patterns in students' use of annotation and response behaviours in social annotation activities. We also explored how students' performance in the behavioural, cognitive, emotional, and social dimensions varied based on their behavioural patterns.

Methods

We recruited 93 undergraduates who were enrolled in an elective course at a large North American University. Students were tasked with collaboratively annotating the class readings uploaded to Perusall, a social annotation platform, over 7 weeks. We used metaclustering to determine the optimal number of clusters pertaining to student behaviours. We compared the differences among clusters across multiple performance dimensions.

Results and Conclusions

Two distinct clusters were identified and defined as initiators and responders. We found that responders had significantly longer active reading time and exhibited greater social annotation effort compared to initiators. However, initiators received more peer acknowledgement, as evidenced by higher upvotes. No significant difference was found in cognitive insight between initiators and responders, but responders demonstrated significantly higher cognitive discrepancy. Additionally, there were no significant differences in positive and negative tones between initiators and responders; however, responders displayed higher levels of prosocial behaviours than initiators. This study has significant practical implications regarding promoting students' collaborative learning experience in social annotation.

Objective
Despite long-standing assumptions that a sense of purpose in life and goal pursuit are mutually supportive, empirical evidence of their reciprocity remains deficient. In the context of a unique out-of-school time program that empowers youth to pursue passions through self-driven learning, we examined whether purpose and one aspect of goal pursuit—perceptions of goal progress—work together to sustain themselves and each other over time.

Method
Adolescents (N = 321) completed daily surveys throughout program enrollment (M_enrollment = 69.09 days). Through dynamic structural equation modeling, we derived within-person patterns of day-to-day prediction as well as individual differences in these patterns.

Results
We found purpose and perceived goal progress exhibited significant daily inertia (i.e., autoregressive prediction) and reciprocity (i.e., cross-lagged prediction) at the within-person level. We also found initial evidence suggesting (a) tighter reciprocity was related to greater perceived goal progress overall and (b) people with greater purpose inertia may rely less on making goal progress to sustain momentum.

Conclusions
With evidence of daily purpose-progress reciprocity, the field can look forward to replicating this work in other contexts, diving deeper into interesting patterns of within-person dynamics, and developing interventions to support youth striving.