Student Engagement : Classroom Action Research Final Comments

The timeline for this Action Research, is short, and can only be applied to the student cohort over several weeks, to allow for time to assess the outcomes. However, lack of time should not constrain this research, as each subject is to be delivered within a 12-week trimester. By specifically directing the interventions to a formative or summative AT, the LTA may be seen as the cause for an improvement in learning and assessment outcomes. These activities, however, cannot be proven beyond doubt, and where improvements have not been seen, the activities also may not be the cause of no improvement. The LTA have allowed students, who have wanted to participate, to expand their understanding of the requirements of the assessments and work collaboratively to arrive at a conclusion. This has allowed me to step back from a teaching and lecturing role and allowed the students to become the More Knowledgeable Other (Verenikina, 2003), assisting one another in learning and understanding. Students are displaying increasing confidence in expressing their thoughts and opinions and seem to be less afraid of making mistakes.

The Jamboard technology limitations regarding student identification have led me to consider a tool, in which students use their student email as a login, to track the participation and work. Small group work, using the Breakout Rooms in Collaborate-Ultra, along with Jamboard as the collaborative whiteboard tool, has seen a greater level of engagement and participation by students in the smaller groups. Students have stated that they have accessed Jamboard out of class time, however I am unable to verify this. I am also unsure whether the anonymity of the tool creates a safe environment for some students.

Having seen the positive outcomes of small group work in this class, I will continue to use Breakout Rooms via Collaborate-Ultra with Jamboard or similar product while in the remote delivery mode. Once we have moved back to face-to-face classes, small group activities should continue and I would use a collaborative whiteboard tool as a resource, so that we are not limited to capturing the outcomes of collaboration on a photo. I would also like to investigate a different tool, such as MS Whiteboard or MS Classroom Notebook, which will allow students to be identified via their login. This will, however, require further investigation from the IT Department.

This research should be repeated with the next class, and it may be worth repeating these LTA in several classes for this subject, to determine whether the findings can be repeated. It should be noted that, while I have not carried out the feedback sessions in any other classes, the intervention LTA have been used in other classes, with changes according to context, and I will review the academic results across all three subjects, to determine whether the results are simply limited to this class.

The subject CoP will receive the outcomes of this research and I would like to pass this across to other facilitators in the GPM vertical. It should be noted that I have not considered benefits that may have resulted from student Reflective Journals. Only 8 students completed Reflective Journals, and these students confirmed their understanding of key concepts via reflections, allowing further feedback. However, the low rate of student uptake of this option cannot provide conclusive results. It appears that students may not participate in learning activities, which are not directly related to their grades, confirming findings by Biggs (2003) that LTA should be constructively aligned to SLO and AT, thus leading the LTA to be more student-centred than teacher centred.

The questions raised by this research are greater than those which have been answered. The initial challenge was lack of student participation and student attendance in classes, as well as low pass rates and high rates of Academic Integrity breaches. The choice to limit the research to studying the impact of a change of LTA was made because of time constraints, and there was no expectation that a definitive answer to the initial challenge would result. The findings have confirmed that LTA should be more constructively aligned and focussed on the outcomes which will be measured via a summative AT. The findings have also confirmed that teacher presence (Garrison, 2020), especially in an online or remote delivery model, is important to students and to learning, especially where student engagement and participation is measured. Finally, the findings have confirmed that students will, generally, prepare for classes, if LTA in class are considered relevant. Students have admitted to not checking the videos and pre-class materials on some occasions, however, their group work and posts on Jamboard have shown a level of understanding of concepts under discussion, and I can only surmise that this has come from the class materials. This may also be a reason for the time taken by some groups to develop their solutions.

As a final consideration, the interventions were carried out with the current cohort of students, and disappointingly, Academic Integrity breaches were still present in this cohort. It appears that in most cases, these students were not present in classes, though for students who were logged on, as identified earlier, there is no way of confirming active presence. The pass rate in this cohort appears to be higher than in the previous cohort, however it is dangerous to draw inferences and to relate this fully to the intervention. Rather, the findings of this CAR should be used by the CoP to review our Teaching and Learning practices and consider changes to our LTA to ensure that these are not only Constructively Aligned to the SLO and the Summative AT, but that we should add similar Formative AT. Since this subject is currently under review, the findings of this CAR, while not able to be a definitive source of information, should not be dismissed, but rather the findings should be considered in an overall discussion and review. I will continue to use these introduced LTA for future classes and will carry these activities in form across to other subjects.

References