For those of you into educational research, what are some of your favorite papers? Anything from foundational works to “oh how interesting” smaller studies.
I’ll start us off with a few items:
Mikki Chi’s ICAP framework. This comes from a meta-analysis that explored the underlying connections between hundreds of other studies, showing clear gains when moving from passive to active to constructive to interactive learning.
Designing effective questions for classroom response system teaching, from one of my old colleagues Ian Beatty. This describes some great tactics for creating not just single problems, but series of problems, in ways that lead learners to reconsider their thinking. Focused on physics but definitely generalizeable.
Active learning : Cooperation in the classroom Johnson and Johnson’s book about active learning, cooperative and collaborative teams structures. Sadly active learning is very difficult to initiate and maintain in pure online courses. So much development needs to be done to organize, tool up and maintain constructive and meaningful human interaction in online learning. I hope to see this develop to maturity in the future.
Oh, how interesting:
Peer Instruction: Ten years of experience and results. Crouch and Mazur’s Think-pair-share strategy for animating class discussions with clickers. This inpired the UBCPI (UBC’s Peer Instruction) multiple choice question format X-block in Open edX.
Learning With Concept and Knowledge Maps: A Meta-Analysis Because concept-mapping is a highly complex intellectual task in which students need to comprehend concepts and link them together in a visual representation. The meta-analysis shows the activity is associated with increased knowledge retention.
Cornell note-taking. Cornell University’s note-taking method is one of the most complete and useful method out there. I cannot understand why so many colleges and universities never teach their students how to take notes, so this is my go-to reference, which I recommend should be added as a reference in the syllabus of all online courses with multiple video lectures.
Shared note-taking: A Smartphone-based approach to increased student engagement in lectures Because note-taking is really an underrated learning strategy, doing it in teams on a collaborative document can help students stay aware in lectures and develop the skill to a new level. This article gave me ideas on how to better take notes on Google Docs during lectures. It would also be interesting to see how it could be translated to the online context.
So this is a bit of a curveball, but one of my biggest areas of interest is the overlap between learning and games (being two of my biggest passions), and this is one of my favourite pieces about trust and serendipity in online games - https://www.raphkoster.com/2018/03/16/the-trust-spectrum/
I feel there’s a ton of overlap between how trust forms in games and how online learning communities (or communities in general) interact and collaborate, and it’s an extremely interesting read that I absolutely recommend.