Research Reviews

The use of online social networking services to improve learning is often confused with social networking for personal and social reasons. Social networks in education can be usefully deployed to increase student engagement and improve learning, especially where a focus on discussion-led learning and student engagement with course material...

The use of social networking tools in education has been lauded for many reasons including the capacity to enable online collaboration that can result in improved learning. The use of online collaboration is a new dimension in education and as such requires a new set of skills for successful implementation as a methodology in course work...

The arrival of interactive web services at the turn of the 21st century spawned a number of new and alluring ways to use online services. Although the use of blogs and wikis can be traced back to the 1990s, their popularity in education began to surge in the early 2000s, so that today there are many choices of applications that can be used...

Teaching can be a demanding profession and student-teachers often come to this realisation during their years of pre-service study in education. Student teaching practice is one part of pre-service teacher education that brings to the fore many of the demands that are made on teachers, in everyday practical situations...

The use of social media for teaching and learning in university courses is rare even though university staff and students are prolific users of social media. Social media is used by staff and students for personal, research or entertainment purposes in their own time but rarely for learning purposes in student courses...

Gender differences in the use of digital devices and the development of digital proficiencies have not been often reported in the literature or educational research. Gender differences have not been significant in many of the studies where gender has been a factor for analysis...

The use of the internet among young people is almost ubiquitous in modern society for personal, social, career and academic purposes. An increasing number of studies have indicated that online spaces help learners to develop language, writing, social and collaborative skills. However, the processes used by learners for searching for information, for evaluating resources and for creating new works are not well understood. The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University has recently published an engaging and thorough report examining the research literature in order to develop a framework for exploring information quality in the youth and digital media context. The lengthy (150 page) and detailed report Youth and Digital Media: From Credibility to Information Quality makes an important contribution to education by providing a framework for information quality that may assist our understanding of how learners use the internet and how educators may be able to harness that knowledge to improve learning.

The educational debate about the use of technology to improve learning performance, strangely, continues among policy makers even today. For example, a recent report that compared educational success in several countries, as measured by international tests, omitted the necessity and the benefits of using technology to improve student achievement. Such out-dated education reporting can be misleading for policy makers and educational leaders. A systemic review that synthesised the findings of over forty years of research has been recently made openly available by the American Educational Research Association in the Review of Educational Research. The study titled What Forty Years of Research Says About the Impact of Technology on Learning: A Second-Order Meta-Analysis and Validation Study quantitatively synthesised ‘findings from a number of meta-analyses addressing a similar research question’ (p. 6). The research question was ‘the effectiveness of computer technology use in educational contexts to answer the big question of technology’s impact on student achievement, when the comparison condition contains no technology use’ (p.6).

Students value timely and constructive feedback on their assignments and it can be very helpful to enable further learning that can improve future performance. The use of technology for providing feedback may be a way to improve the usefulness of feedback to students as part of the assessment process. Students in secondary schools, training organisations and universities can find immediate feedback invaluable in order to guide their progress. A broad canvas of feedback approaches are considered and explored in a recent literature review of feedback associated with assignments and assessments for university students. The review, Using technology to encourage student engagement with feedback: a literature review, is published in the journal Research in Learning Technology which is now openly accessible and a journal worth following.

The use of computers in education has introduced dual reading modes: on paper and on screen. Concerns have been raised about how readers interact with each mode, especially on screen, and the processes that are used for reading and comprehension given that most university students use computers and increasingly tablets for study. Two recent announcements in the US may mean that students will be reading from screens even more. The US Government has set the goal of an e-textbook for all school students within five years and Apple have launched digital textbooks and free software called ibooks to develop digital textbooks. What does research find about reading on screen compared to reading on paper? In a study called The Phenomenology of on-screen reading: University students’ lived experience of digitised text researchers found that increasingly ‘paper based books and papers are digitised and then read on screen’ (p. 516). Previous research had suggested that on screen reading is haphazard, interrupted, unfocused and does not translate into academic reading. The Phenomenology of on-screen reading: University students’ lived experience of digitised text overcame that simplistic and erroneous perspective and delved deeper into the processes that students use when reading on screen. Six interesting phenomena were identified that provide an insight into the practices of on screen reading.