Zhu, Gaoxia

This chapter will explore how the affordances of technological platforms (i.e. web versions and mobile apps) can enhance student self-assessment (SSA) and as a result, generating feedback, promoting learning, and improving performance (Andrade, 2019). It begins with recapping the key features of SSA as presented in Chapter 2 and the conditions conducive for its success in Chapter 3. This is followed by a review of literature on the advantages that technology may offer in the whole SSA process. To illustrate such advantages, three cases on how teachers use technology-enhanced SSA are presented. The chapter concludes with a reflection on the limitations and future directions in this area.

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.

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.