Interacción entre la radiación y la materia

This theme examines students’ discomfort with anything aside from what they had previously been used to and non-teacher feedback. The three findings presented below show students’ (dis)comfort with (1) new classroom learning strategies and (2) (2) minimal teacher feedback and handholding.

5.3.1 (Dis)comfort with the New: Classroom Learning Strategies

Though this was the so-called digital generation, which will be discussed further in section 5.6, students were conditioned to traditional methods of classroom teaching and learning. Consequently, their learning and expectations were interestingly different from what was expected of them. For instance, students insisted that they needed to complete their online tasks together, regardless of the convenience of online learning which purports flexibility in that students did not need to meet physically.

Extract 1: Interview 2

Interviewer: But the thing is that the time lapse is for you to go in at your convenience …

Don: No. We don’t do that. Interviewer: Why?

Don:Ya no no but we don’t do that.

Inteviewer: Ya, why?

Don: Well like most people don’t do that. Because it is like umm…no…it is more like an assignment, so we just take like one time shot, like essay.

Interviewer: So, you see more as an assignment and prefer to finish it at one go?

Don: Something like that. Yes.

As seen from Don’s responses, students had specific conceptions of what constituted an assignment and how they should be completed. Consequently, despite the assignments being placed on different platforms, they would rather complete them in the way that they were used to. Because whilst forum was not “a bad platform for discussion,” the problem was that students were “not used to that kind of forum platform” (Ezekiel, Interview 3). Furthermore, “it [was] easier to voice out what [they were] thinking … instead of typing it out in actual words” (ibid). To students, writing as compared to speaking, seemed more challenging because “the thought-process between speaking and typing is quite different” and in terms of a discussion, it was easier to do it face-to-face because “it was much faster, and to the point” (Tim, Interview 3). Yet students also highlighted that they tended to automatically adopt a different register for both speaking and writing, be it on the forum or for an academic piece of work. As Ezekiel explained “oral form is more colloquial … it’s much easier to express what you are trying to say rather than typing it out” (Interview 3). When asked if he changed his register to a more formal academic tone whilst writing, Ezekiel confirmed with an emphatic, “yes” (Interview 3).

Likewise, in classroom teaching, there were students who indicated that they preferred the lecture format. As Nathan explained, “it [was] just easier to follow … you [could] just listen and copy. It's … what I [was] more used to” (Interview 3). The preference for the familiar also applied to students engaged in groupwork. For instance, in group tasks that required them to complete an essay, students complained that though the essay was divided into different parts, they still needed to do

individual work and their only gain was a shorter section. Furthermore, they had to contend with coherence issues.

Extract 2. Interview 2

Sally: … I thought it was a bit weird that we would be doing it as a group because it's just weird writing essay in a group of three … it’s weird.

Interviewer: … Jerome?

Jerome: Yeah, I second Sally's opinion … I provided the structure of the essay, in essence I did most of the analysis, in that sense I feel a bit of forced because I was telling them what to say and I don’t really know if they had anything, if they could had add anything else …

Sally: I added stuff.

Jerome: I mean it's okay, if someone did all that to me, I would like that too. .. [But] it's not really the best way to do analysis, especially seeing in the end, you still have to do your own.

Sally: Yeah, it was more like just splitting the essay up and making people do chunks, so it wasn't like we were doing together. It was more like we just got to write shorter essays.

Interviewer: You were supposed to do it together.

Sally:Yeah, but it's hard to do it together, especially online because where at home it is hard to communicate online … and discuss.

Students were clearly uncomfortable with online groupwork, despite the convenience of online platforms, and though they would demarcate work such as blogs and wikis, they did not regard an essay as a viable task that could be split. Nonetheless, in arguing that the essay would still be an individual effort meant that students saw the task as an actual piece of graded assignment and not one for collaborative peer work, which will be further discussed in section 5.7.

5.3.2 (Dis)comfort with the Non-Teacher Feedback: Handholding

Similarly, students were accustomed to teachers’ handholding and clearly uncomfortable with the unknown, particularly with ‘new’ tasks or non-teacher feedback. Nathan’s discomfort with being the first in unchartered waters resulted in him “wait[ing] for someone to do it” (Interview 2). This discomfort with the unchartered could also mean that students were less likely to venture or ‘innovate’ on the task given. This is not unlike what was discussed in the previous section on the discomfort with new classroom strategies (i.e. online forum). But more importantly,

Nathan’s discomfort underscored students’ awareness that there was less ‘policing’ by the teacher and hence, no accountability.

Students also displayed signs of uncertainty when they had to make decisions outside of what had been taught in classrooms:

Extract 3. Interview 2

Jerome: One thing that pops out was in the forum, at least from my understanding, you have to have several different opinions on the motivation of the character … But from the content we got from the lesson, it seems that we only really have one. There's only one perspective to view the content. So, in that sense, it was difficult to conduct a conversation about it … so … we … ended up … talking to ourselves. And then I agree with this post; I agree, I agree, I agree because there’s really only one way to view it.

As shown in the above extract, Jerome’s rationale in not being able to proffer differing perspectives was because they were not given other perspectives, hence, laying the problem with the teacher. Another source of contention for students was what they regarded as a lack of student guidance and feedback. In their first blog, guidelines were deliberately kept general and students were expected to conduct their own research. Students’ feedback was that they were confused and preferred more guidelines.

Extract 4. Interview 2

Navin: … For that particular blog, we were kind of confused ... So, in the end, we researched on how to do a blog. Or just did it from the knowledge in our head, what it might look like, what we believe of how it looks like.

Students reflected that the lack of scaffolding meant that they were relying on either google search or their previous experiences. As such, their need for more scaffolding was made apparent especially when students indicated that the follow-up lesson which included a summary of key learning points and oral grading was most useful. As Daryl shared, without being given detailed guidelines meant that they were “forced to research on … [their] own” and whilst that helped in their learning, what was “more useful” would be “a bit more pointers or tips” that they “could use during the actual process” (Interview 2). Similarly, tasks given without detailed individual feedback saw students’ reluctance in accepting them as revision materials. Instead, they only

referenced those that had “already [been] corrected” (Georgia, Interview 3). All of which clearly displayed the students’ fixation on always needing the teacher’s stamp of approval on their work.

In summary, the findings presented here highlight the (dis)comfort that students had with the new and their subsequent resistance to new classroom learning strategies and non-teacher feedback.