Students’ Engagement in Learning Activities in and Out of School

• In Event: Roundtable Session 79
  In Roundtable Session: Cross-Context Studies of Learners’ Experiences of and in Activity

Abstract

The purpose of this work is to document students’ experiences of learning in and out of school to better understand how students perceive and make choices about how to engage in various learning activities and how activities might be designed to support students to make meaning across learning activities; adding to a body of research that explores the nature of interactions between individuals and activity contexts.

Drawing from activity theory (cf. Engestrom, Miettinen, and Punamaki-Gitai, 1999, cf. Kaptelinin and Nardi, 2006) and learning motivation and goals frameworks (Urdan and Maehr, 1995), we developed the Learning Activity Framework (LAF) to guide research design and methods. The LAF is a set of dimensions of activity that are relevant to learning activities including: students’ goals for participating, ways of judging their progress, uses of feedback, strategies for seeking help, categories of self-identification, the role and value of social interaction with peers and family, etc.

Study participants were 10 fifth-grade students, 5 boys and 5 girls, in an affluent Bay Area suburb. Participants equally represented frequent, average, and infrequent participators in class activities. Students and parents were each separately interviewed about students’ school and non-school learning activities on two separate occasions for 60 to 90 minutes each. Log data was also collected from a web-based learning environment used in science class and as homework. Data were analyzed to determine how students would describe and/or engage in various learning activities.

Initial results of the study indicate that students describe both school and non-school learning activities with a great deal of consistency (e.g., solicitation and use of feedback, help seeking, value of peer interaction as part of the activity, etc.). Students’ use of various features of the web-based environment that was part of classroom and homework assignments was generally consistent across home and school contexts; while this finding is not surprising, the profiles of use of features mirrored patterns of engagement derived from students’ and parents’ interviews. For example, Susie’s description of her activities suggests that she is motivated by social participation in virtually all contexts. She reports being sensitive to critique but reliant on others’ input and opinions, especially guidance from adults. She prefers practicing instead of advancing to more complex levels of learning and does not express motivations relating to competition even though she participates in many sports. Susie’s log data indicates extensive use ‘chat’ and help features and avoidance of a ‘gameshow’ feature that pitted students against their classmates to test their knowledge of science content from class, a pattern reflected across her activities.

The Learning Activity Framework focused research design and analysis on aspects of activity that captured patterns of engagement that had meaning both in students’ own descriptions and in their observed behavior. Next steps for this research are to further explore aspects of students’ experiences that varied by context to extend our models of student experience. This study illustrates a promising method for further, more extensive, exploration of the structure of learning activities.

Authors

• Britte Haugan Cheng, SRI International

• Patrik Lundh, SRI International