In recent years an increasing focus has been placed on the development of students’ skills of critical thinking, problem solving and independent learning, throughout their time at university. There is an increasing shift towards incorporating activities which promote students’ active engagement with course materials – with the intention of promoting a deeper understanding of their chosen subject. Many tools and techniques are available that facilitate students’ transition from the passive recipient of knowledge, to a central, active actor in the learning process. One such tool, PeerWise, is an online, free to use application where students are encouraged to write multiple choice questions for their peers to answer, resulting in a bank of questions for students to test their knowledge and understanding. Students are given opportunities to give feedback to question authors on the quality of the question, in the form of a numerical rating or a qualitative comment, which provides further scope for students to engage in discussion about the question. It is hypothesised that actively engaging with course material will promote a deeper understanding of its content and will develop students’ skills of problem solving and critical thinking. The research in this thesis explores the relationship between engagement with PeerWise and performance in end of course examinations in six courses (physics, chemistry and biology), across three academic years within three research intensive UK universities. This work aims to unpick the nature of student interactions on PeerWise, and the extent to which engagement with each activity on the system is associated with attainment, when controlling for a student’s prior ability and other relevant factors such as their gender. Student views on engaging with the system have also been gathered to understand the degree to which students find PeerWise useful to their learning, and the ways in which they interact with the platform. Although the results paint a complex picture of the relationship between PeerWise use and attainment, in most courses, and for most ability levels, students who engage to a higher level with PeerWise achieve a higher exam score than their lower engaging peers. There is also often a significant, positive correlation between engaging with PeerWise and end of course exam score which persists, even when controlling for a student’s prior ability. Although it would seem to be that answering questions and writing high quality feedback is more often associated with attainment than writing questions and receiving feedback, the results suggest that engagement across all activities is most beneficial to students – indicating that overall engagement with the task is key to student learning.

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Self-generated questions are a central mechanism for learning, yet students' questions are often infrequent during classroom instruction. As a result, little is known about the nature of student questioning during typical instructional contexts such as listening to a lecture, including the extent and nature of student-generated questions, how students evaluate their questions, and the relations among questions, motivations, and achievement. This study examined the questions undergraduate students (N = 103) generated during 8 lectures in an introductory chemistry course. Students recorded and appraised their question in daily question logs and reported lecture-specific self-efficacy beliefs. Self-efficacy, personal interest, goal orientations, and other motivational self-beliefs were measured before and after the unit. Primary analyses included testing path models, multiple regressions, and latent class analyses. Overall, results indicated that several characteristics of student questioning during lectures were significantly related to various motivations and achievement. Higher end-of-class self-efficacy was associated with fewer procedural questions and more questions that reflected smaller knowledge deficits. Lower exam scores were associated with questions reflecting broader knowledge deficits and students' appraisals that their questions had less value for others than for themselves. Individual goal orientations collectively and positively predicted question appraisals. The questions students generated and their relations with motivational variables and achievement are discussed in light of the learning task and academic context. / Educational Psychology

Engaging the student's prior knowledge is considered by educational researchers to be an important part of constructing a strong foundation for new learning. Diagrams are one technique used in the classroom. Jill Larkin and Herbert Simon described the computational advantages of diagrams over text when used to communicate information in their 1987 article entitled 'Why a Diagram is (Sometimes) Worth Ten Thousand Words.' This case study describes a novel abstract diagramming technique facilitated in four separate university classroom settings. Using paper and crayons, the students created three diagrams that represented the externalization of their unconscious perceptions of their own prior knowledge. The study illustrates how differences in prior knowledge can be visualized using diagrams with greater speed in less time than the traditional use of text-based descriptions. The use of the abstract diagramming technique led to an unexpected finding. The student diagrams were shown to contain a hidden conceptual topology, one that is described by Egenhofer in his 1991 article entitled 'Reasoning About Binary Topological Relations.' This topology is recommended as a framework for structuring and facilitating student collaboration and sharing of prior knowledge and new learning. The present study recommends the diagramming technique as the basis for the establishment of a standard diagram research framework that can be used across multiple research disciplines and subject domains. This dissertation describes a domain-general abstract diagram technique that can be adapted for domain-specific subjects and made operational using basic materials (paper and crayons). The study also describes the instructors' responses to questions about the diagram technique used in their classes. The case study offers recommendations for future diagram research. / Ph. D.

Active learning has been suggested to be more effective than traditional learning in terms of exam results and time spent on the course material, making it an attractive alternative to the traditional lectures. One way of practicing active learning is through active learnersourcing, a method of learning that also generates material that contributes to further learning. Learnersourcing can be practiced by generating multiple choice questions (MCQs) related to the course material. However, generating useful and high-quality MCQs is challenging for students, especially since the available digital systems developed for this purpose have great issues in terms of user-friendliness and their outdated visual design. Two of these systems are RiPPLE and PeerWise. When developing a platform designed for generating MCQs for learning, there are general and specific guidelines that can be followed: Nielsen’s 10 heuristics for a good user interface/user experience, and 10 principles for a good MCQ. In this thesis, a new system was developed where these guidelines were applied, as an attempt to investigate if the user experience can be improved compared to the currently available interfaces RiPPLE and PeerWise. The project was named MyCleverQuestion. A user test was conducted, in which the three systems’ interfaces for creating and submitting a question were compared and graded. The results shows that the users had the best experience when using MyCleverQuestion. 83.3% of the users said they would use MyCleverQuestion again, stressing the importance of both a good user interface and user experience. / Aktivt lärande har visat sig vara effektivare än traditionellt lärande i avseende till tentamensresultat och tid studenter spenderar på kursmaterialet, och är således ett attraktivt alternativ till de traditionella föreläsningarna. Ett sätt att utöva aktivt lärande är genom att skapa flervalsfrågor kopplade till kursmaterialet. Denna metod kallas aktiv learnersourcing och gör att man genom lärandet även bidrar med material som kan användas för vidare lärande. Det är dock svårt för studenter att skapa högkvalitativa och användbara flervalsfrågor med hjälp av de digitala system som utvecklats för detta syfte, då deras användarvänlighet är bristande och visuella utformning är föråldrade. RiPPLE och PeerWise är två system utvecklade för att skapa flervalsfrågor i utbildningssyfte, och har båda användarvänlighetsproblem. Det finns särskilda riktlinjer som kan följas för att utveckla ett system där studenter kan generera flervalsfrågor för att utöva aktivt lärande. I denna uppsats har både generella och specifika riktlinjer använts: 10 generella heuristiska principer för att skapa en bra användarupplevelse och användargränssnitt, samt 10 principer för att skapa en bra flervalsfrågas, för att slutligen undersöka om användarupplevelsen kan förbättras jämfört med RiPPLE och PeerWise. Namnet som valdes för projektet var MyCleverQuestion. En användarundersökning genomfördes, där gränssnittet för att skapa en fråga för varje system utvärderades. Resultatet visar att gränssnittet med bäst användarupplevelse är MyCleverQuestion. 83,3% av användarna angav att de skulle använda MyCleverQuestion igen, vilket bevisar vikten av ett bra gränssnitt.

Prior to writing our thesis, a course at the Royal institute of technology allowed alternative methods to present our knowledge. We decided to create a podcast. During the process of creating the podcast we started discussing how the examiner would assess this compared to our peers creating written solutions. This resulted in three questions that later became our research questions: How does written versus podcast affect the grading from teachers and teacher students? What parameters should be considered when creating a task for written and podcast? What is the general view among teachers for using pupil-generated podcasts? To answer these questions, we created an experiment and a survey. The experiment aimed to answer the first two questions and gave us the following results: by only altering the format between podcast and written, our participants assessing the podcast were more keen to give forward and comprehensive feedback, while our participants assessing written focused more on what was missing and commented on small details. The second research question was answered by analyzing the task we created for our experiment. We found that source integration is needed to reduce confusion. The survey implies that no teachers were against using pupil-generated podcasts but STEM teachers were more picky on how and when it can be implemented. We hope that this thesis inspires further research in the relatively new area of pupil/student-generated podcasts. / Innan vi skrev vårt examensarbete tillät en kurs vid Kungliga tekniska högskolan alternativa metoder för att presentera vår kunskap. Vi bestämde oss för att skapa en podcast. Under processen med att skapa podcasten började vi diskutera hur examinatorn skulle bedöma detta jämfört med våra kurskamrater som skapade skriftliga lösningar. Detta resulterade i tre frågor som senare blev våra forskningsfrågor: Hur påverkar skriftligt kontra podcast bedömningen från lärare och lärarstudenter? Hur kan en uppgift skapas för att fungera för både podcast och skriftlig bedömning? Vad är den allmänna uppfattningen bland lärare kring att använda elevgenererade podcasts? För att svara på dessa frågor skapade vi ett experiment och en enkät. Experimentet ämnade till att svara på de två första frågorna och gav oss följande resultat: genom att bara ändra formatet mellan podcast och skrift, hade våra deltagare som bedömde podcasten mer fokuspå att ge forward feedback och mer övergripande feedback, medan våra deltagare som bedömde skriftligt fokuserade mer på vad som saknades och kommenterade på smådetaljer. Den andra forskningsfrågan besvarades genom att analysera den uppgift vi skapade för vårt experiment. Vi fann att ett bättre arbetssätt gällande källor behövs för att minska förvirring. Enkäten antyder att inga lärare var emot att använda elevers genererade podcasts menSTEM-lärare var mer kräsna på hur och när det kan implementeras. Vi hoppas att detta examensarbete inspirerar till ytterligare forskning inom det relativt nya området: elev- och studentgenererade podcasts.

This study explored the effectiveness of a student question creation process engaging students actively in self, peer, and instructor interaction in development of affective, cognitive, and meta-cognitive skills. Employing a mixed-methods sequential explanatory design assigning both treatment and control activities sequentially in an alternating pattern over a six week period, students' performance on exams as well as their perceptions of various aspects of the student question creation process were used to evaluate the effectiveness of student-created questions (SCQs) activities as a cognitive strategy and to identify factors contributing to the effectiveness of question creation activities on students' learning. Subjects of this study were high performing and highly motivated graduate students in an 8-week online biomedical statistics course, part of a specialized master's program designed for medical school preparation. Survey findings and focus groups strongly supported the student question creation process as a facilitator of higher order thinking. However, the relatively short study duration, comparison of student question creation with another competing method for facilitating learning (discussion board) and not a pure control group, and availability of a common study guide course with student-created questions on all course topics may have muted assessment of the full impact of the strategy on learning. Although practically difficult in an education environment, further research to assess fully the impact of the student question creation strategy is desirable especially if these confounding factors can be greatly minimized, if not eliminated.