New Pub: From the Automated Assessment of Student Essay Content to Highly Informative Feedback: a Case Study

New Pub: From the Automated Assessment of Student Essay Content to Highly Informative Feedback: a Case Study

Artificial Intelligence, Assessment, Computational Psychometrics, Empirical Study, Feedback, Higher Education, Journal, Publication, Special Issue, Technical paper
How can we give students highly informative feedback on their essays using natural language processing? In our new paper, led by Sebastian Gombert, we present a case study on using GBERT and T5 models to generate feedback for educational psychology students. In this paper: ➡ We implemented a two-step pipeline that segments the essays and predicts codes from the segments. The codes are used to generate feedback texts informing the students about the correctness of their solutions and the content areas they need to improve. ➡ We used 689 manually labelled essays as training data for our models. We compared GBERT, T5, and bag-of-words baselines for both steps. The results showed that the transformer-based models outperformed the baselines in both steps. ➡ We evaluated the feedback with a learner cohort…
Read More
New Article – Gender diversity dynamics in a Computer Supported Collaborative Learning

New Article – Gender diversity dynamics in a Computer Supported Collaborative Learning

Artificial Intelligence, Computer-supported collaborative learning, Digitalisation, Empirical Study, Gender, Higher Education, Journal, Learning Design, New Pub, Open access, Publication, Special Issue, Team
🎉 Exciting News! Our article has just been published in the magazine of Computer Assisted Learning! 📰 We delved into the fascinating world of online group learning among adults, unravelling the mysteries of emergent team roles and their intricate connection to gender dynamics in communication. 🌐👥 Have you ever wondered how team roles subtly surface and evolve in online group learning discussions? We did, too! Our research explores the subtle nuances of team roles and their subversive emergence, especially when viewed through the lens of gender diversity, in order to understand how to support more productive learning for all participants. Gender and gender diversity are group features affecting social interaction and are critical for gender-inclusive and equitable education. As such, the role of gender and gender diversity is of particular…
Read More
New Pub: Social Presence and Psychological Distance

New Pub: Social Presence and Psychological Distance

Computer-supported collaborative learning, Empirical Study, Higher Education, Journal, Learning Design, New Pub, Publication
Social presence –the sense that others are 'real' and 'there'– is a key variable in understanding interpersonal dynamics in online learning environments. As students are separated in time and place, social cues are diminished and communication is affected. This is particularly relevant for social learning scenarios like computer-supported collaborative learning. Despite its relevance and decades of research, there are still many gaps in our understanding of social presence. In order to arrive at a more holistic understanding of social presence, it would be valuable to better understand how this experience fits within larger psychological frameworks. One particularly well-established psychological framework is Construal Level Theory by Trope & Liberman (2010). It posits that our mental representations of objects, events, and persons (i.e. construals) are affected by the psychological distance between us…
Read More
New Pub: Development and initial validation of an instrument to measure student feedback literacy

New Pub: Development and initial validation of an instrument to measure student feedback literacy

Empirical Study, Feedback, Higher Education, Journal, Open access, Publication
To ensure quality higher education, students should routinely receive feedback on their academic endeavors. Alongside the question of what makes feedback effective, there is also an emerging research literature about empowering students to understand and utilize that feedback effectively. These abilities and attitudes of students have recently been subsumed under the concept of feedback literacy. The concept of feedback literacy was conceived by Carless and Boud (2018) as “the understandings, capacities, and dispositions needed to make sense of information and use it to enhance work or learning strategies.” Since then, a vibrant research literature has developed theoretical frameworks, explored dimensions of feedback literacy, and investigated whether feedback literacy can systematically be enhanced, etc. However, what is still missing are larger-scale rigorous investigations of the extent to which feedback literacy actually…
Read More
New publication: Use of digital self-control tools in higher education

New publication: Use of digital self-control tools in higher education

Empirical Study, Higher Education, Open access, Publication, Research topic, Self-Regulation, Target group
Digital Self-Control Tools in Higher Education: A Dive into Effectiveness and Perception While the accessibility to information and the myriad of online learning resources offer a wealth of benefits, the potential for distraction can hinder academic progress. Addressing this paradox, our educational technologies research group has delved into the realm of digital self-control tools (DSCTs) to better understand their utilization, effectiveness, and perception among higher education students. Our findings have been published in the article "Use of digital self-control tools in higher education – a survey study" in the  journal "Education and Information Technologies". A widespread issue among students today is the struggle between immediate gratification and the pursuit of long-term academic goals. Distractions such as social media browsing and video watching can often compete with essential study time. The…
Read More
New Pub: How well does teacher education prepare for teaching with technology?

New Pub: How well does teacher education prepare for teaching with technology?

Competence development, Digitalisation, Empirical Study, Higher Education, Journal, Open access, Publication
Despite large-scale investments into the technological infrastructure of K-12 education, research has repeatedly shown that many teachers lack the expertise to effectively incorporate technology into classroom teaching. To support teachers in this, there is a need to understand how and when the relevant knowledge develops during teacher training. To this end, Joshua Weidlich and Marco Kalz conducted a study at Heidelberg University of Education, sampling prospective teachers (N = 526) and analyzing their self-reported technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPACK) across the seven dimensions of the framework. Specifically, they assessed (1) the extent to which students more advanced in their studies reported higher TPACK, (2) the effect of gender on these trajectories, and (3) the potential role of curricular cornerstones of the teacher education program. Regarding (1), they found that not…
Read More
New Pub: Untangling connections between challenges in the adoption of learning analytics in higher education

New Pub: Untangling connections between challenges in the adoption of learning analytics in higher education

Empirical Study, Higher Education, Journal, Learning Analytics, Publication
[caption id="attachment_4599" align="alignnone" width="967"] Associations of challenges and ethics: (a) none, (b) prep-partial, and (c) full adoption institutions[/caption] Potential benefits of learning analytics (LA) for improving students' performance, predicting students' success, and enhancing teaching and learning practice have increasingly been recognized in higher education. However, the adoption of LA in higher education institutions (HEIs) to date remains sporadic and predominantly small in scale due to several socio-technical challenges. To better understand why HEIs struggle to scale LA adoption, it is needed to untangle adoption challenges and their related factors. This paper presents the findings of a study that sought to investigate the associations of adoption factors with challenges HEIs face in the adoption of LA and how these associations are compared among HEIs at different scopes of adoption. The study…
Read More
New Pub: Connecting the dots – A literature review on learning analytics indicators from a learning design perspective

New Pub: Connecting the dots – A literature review on learning analytics indicators from a learning design perspective

Empirical Study, Higher Education, Journal, Learning Analytics, Learning Design, Lifelong Learning, Literature review, Open access, Publication, Self-Regulation, Special Issue, Target group
[caption id="attachment_4329" align="alignright" width="450"] Occurrences of the most commonly used learning analytic indicators over the past 10 years[/caption] Background: During the past decade, the increasingly heterogeneous field of learning analytics has been critiqued for an over-emphasis on data-driven approaches at the expense of paying attention to learning designs. Method and objective: In response to this critique, we investigated the role of learning design in learning analytics through a systematic literature review. 161 learning analytics (LA) articles were examined to identify indicators that were based on learning design events and their associated metrics. Through this research, we address two objectives. First, to achieve a better alignment between learning design and learning analytics by proposing a reference framework, where we present possible connections between learning analytics and learning design. Second, to present how…
Read More
New Pub: Extending Social Presence Theory

New Pub: Extending Social Presence Theory

Empirical Study, Higher Education, Journal, Learning Design, Publication
In the area of online learning and distance education, social presence is considered a key concept to understand interpersonal processes that are mediated by technology. At the same time, theory surrounding social presence remains underdeveloped. For example, under which conditions is social presence particularly important? Do students always need high perceptions of social presence in their learning experiences? A strong theory should provide tentative answers to questions like these. Yet, as of now, our knowledge is mostly restricted to correlations coefficients between measures of social presence and outcome variables like satisfaction. Without further nuance, learning designers do not know under which circumstances they should prioritize designing for interpersonal aspects or instead focus on other aspects. To advance a more nuanced understanding of social presence, Joshua Weidlich, Derya Göksün, and Karel…
Read More
New Pub: Measuring Productivity in CSCL groups

New Pub: Measuring Productivity in CSCL groups

Assessment, Conference, Empirical Study, Higher Education, Learning Design, Publication
Computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) is a common pedagogical approach, in which groups of students work together digitally to engage in learning activities, solve problems, or create a shared artefact. CSCL is further interesting from a research standpoint, because different disciplines want to understand the processes and circumstances from which productive social interaction in online groups emerge to facilitate learning among group members. As such, group productivity is a central outcome to be considered in CSCL research. At the same time, the current literature does not provide a valid and reliable self-report instrument to measure group productivity.   [caption id="attachment_3914" align="alignleft" width="325"] Wright Map[/caption] [caption id="attachment_3915" align="alignleft" width="323"] Category probability curves with six (top) versus 5 (bottom) rating scale steps[/caption]                      …
Read More