What Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) skills do students learn through robots?
In preparing to answer the second research question, the literature was explored to identify methodological techniques and approaches that can be used to identify and measure the STEM skills students learn through robots. The participants in this study were primary students (n=32) aged 9-12 years who were enrolled in a school of distance education. They operated in a digital environment where asynchronous and synchronous learning was blended. Students routinely used tools that enabled synchronous interaction with teachers and other students, and access to asynchronous web-based materials hosted on, Blackboard, the school’s learning content management system. For the purpose of this study, two digital tools, blogs and video recordings, were investigated in terms of their efficacy as instruments for measuring STEM skill learning.
First, the use of blogs is discussed. A blog, or ‘weblog’, is defined here as a discussion or informational site consisting of discrete entries or ‘posts’ that is published on the World Wide Web. A blog is an online journal that can be continuously updated by users, in their own words, online (Matheson, 2004). According to Jimoyiannis & Angelaina (2012), blogs can be used for a variety of purposes. A blog can act as a forum where students discuss, share, and exchange information, thoughts, and ideas related to their course of study, operating more as
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a collective or collaborative space than as an individual one. As such a blog can be used as a collaborative content-sharing space to support project-based learning activities.
In a review of empirical research on the use of blogs, Sim & Hew (2010) reported multiple benefits for students in higher education settings who engage in ‘blogging’. Students who use blogs, it was found, are able to externalise their reflective reasoning through writing (Zeng & Harris, 2005), and develop insights into assumptions and beliefs that render or impede their judgments (Sharma & Xie, 2008). The externalised reflective reasoning and increased insight occurs because the blog prompts students to offer evidence, elaboration, and justification, and to critically evaluate solutions (Loving, Schroeder, Kang, Shimek, & Herbert, 2007). Blogs were also found to promote reflectivity through student engagement in active transactions among assumptions, motivations, and descriptions (Stiller & Philleo, 2003). Students were able to view their thought progression over time (Ellison & Wu, 2008), along with the growth of their individual knowledge base (Baggetun & Wasson, 2006).
While the literature clearly articulates the value of student participation in blogs, the challenge for researchers in terms of research methodology, is to quantify student engagement and learning in educational blogs. Three studies are cited that focus on the analysis of blogs. First, in research conducted by Yang (2009), a qualitative approach was applied to the analysis of a blog used by student teachers (n=43). The blog postings were analysed to determine whether students could critically reflect on what they had learned. Specifically, the analysis focussed on the type of reflection, the role of the teacher trainers in the process of blogging, and how a blog might promote critical reflection and enhance the effectiveness of a community of practice. Qualitative data was collected consisting of messages and comments posted on the blog by the students, and group reflective dialogues recorded by instructors in class meetings in relation to the implementation of the blogs during the course. Then an end-of-semester questionnaire was administered to each student. The blog postings were sorted into categories using a framework adapted from Ho & Richards (1993), with topics listed and analysed to identify aspects of their reflection, specifically whether it was descriptive or critical.
Using a similar approach, an analysis framework was developed by Jimoyiannis & Angelaina (2012), based on a Community of Inquiry (CoI) model and Social Network Analysis. Included in the evaluation was an investigation of the different ways that K-9 students (n=21) engaged in a blog-based project, in terms of their social and cognitive presence. The CoI analysis of blog postings indicated that integration of ideas and construction of meaning can be directly inferred from student participation, with students achieving higher thinking and cognitive levels through their adoption of different roles in the blog.
In more recent research, Xie & Sharma (2013) analysed the blogging behaviour of tertiary students (n=9) using a tool that combined the features of blogging with the ability to extract and manipulate concepts. Blog users were allowed to attach up to five keywords to each post and link the keywords on a concept map. Mental maps of the blog texts were produced with calculating nodes of high centrality (most talked about nodes and most connected nodes). Data analysis was undertaken using AutoMap and Organizational Risk Analyzer software with comparisons of student-generated keywords made against the mental map nodes. Findings suggested that two-thirds of the student-attached keywords matched the mental map nodes, indicating that the map analysis method can produce reliable indexes of a given text that may serve as anchor points for further content analysis.
30 3.3:1 Data gathering for Research Question 2
In this study, students (n=32) were encouraged to contribute to a blog that was hosted within Blackboard, the school’s learning content management system. The aim of the blog was to enable students to establish their social and cognitive presence (Jimoyiannis & Angelaina, 2012) as participants in the study. At the start of the study, students were informed by the teacher that they could use the blog to share information and ideas about robots with other project team members. Students were encouraged to tell each other what they already knew and thought about robots, and also what they would like to learn about robots. Thus, the blog was designed to engage students in reflective reasoning about robots, including quantitative skills, critical thinking, creativity, and behavioural and social skills, in parallel with disciplinary knowledge, as evidence of STEM learning (Australian Government, 2014c). The analysis of the blog data was undertaken using transcriptions of the blog postings made by the students. These were analysed using NVivo, a qualitative data analysis software package that enables textual data of the type gathered in the blog to be to captured, read and manipulated. As suggested by Yang (2009), a thematic analysis of the transcriptions was undertaken and the information sorted into categories with keywords identified from STEM learning criteria (Xie & Sharma, 2013). Themes were created using keywords identified from STEM learning, then ‘nodes’ were established around specific blog postings, according to coding density. This thematic information was used to produce a set of statistics, based on the most talked about the most connected nodes, from which student social and cognitive presence was quantified. The answer, then, to the second research question was determined through an analysis of the blog data that was used to identify the STEM skills learned by students through robots.
The discussion will now turn to the third research question which investigates the learning by students when they operate a robot remotely using a LDCR.