Gamification, or the use of game elements in non-game contexts, has become an increasingly popular approach to increasing end-user engagement in many contexts, including employee productivity, sales, recycling, and education. Our preliminary work has shown that gamification can be used to boost student engagement and learning in basic software testing. We seek to expand our gamified software en...

The paper explores preliminary data of four cases in a larger study investigating the effects on learning of a new educational technology called Media Annotation Tool (MAT). In particular, the paper focuses on learning engagement with MAT and begins to raise questions about what factors promote or enhance engagement. Drawing on the work of Kirkwood (2009), the authors analyse the type of educat...

Engagement is being widely recognised as critical to the learning process. Either formally or informally this term arises during most discussions about learning, especially when ICT is being used to enhance learning environments. While suggestions abound for ways of using ICT in learning to increase engagement, few of these reports offer means for recognising and measuring engagement. This pape...

87 Since Coleman et al. (1966) began to explore school effects on student achievement in the United States, research on a relationship between education resources (e.g. money, curricula, and facilities) and education outcomes (e.g. student achievement, cognitive development) has taken large part of educational research in the twentieth century ((Burstein, 1980; Bryk & Raudenbush, 1992; Sammons,...

There has been a national movement to transition college science courses from passive lectures to active learning environments. Active learning has been shown to be a more effective way for students to learn, yet there is concern that some students are resistant to active learning approaches. Although there is much discussion about student resistance to active learning, few studies have explore...

This article reviews the results from an in-depth multi-site case study of 20 institutions examining approaches to student engagement exploring differences by mission. The research questions pursued were: Is mission related to distinctive approaches for creating an engaging environment for students? If so, in what ways? The results demonstrate a set of relationships between institutional missio...

The primary measure used to determine relative effectiveness of in-class activities has been student performance on pre/posttests. However, in today's active-learning classrooms, learning is a social activity, requiring students to interact and learn from their peers. To develop effective active-learning exercises that engage students, it is important to gain a more holistic view of the student...

Two of the major goals in Educational Data Mining are determining students’ state of knowledge and determining whether students are affectively engaged with the task and in positive affective states. These two problems are usually examined separately and multiple methods have been proposed to solve each of them. However, little work has been done on tracing both of these states in parallel and ...

Despite the widespread use of social media by students and its increased use by instructors, very little empirical evidence is available concerning the impact of social media use on student learning and engagement. This paper describes our semester-long experimental study to determine if using Twitter – the microblogging and social networking platform most amenable to ongoing, public dialogue –...