Educational Research: Incorporating Digital Artefacts into the Classroom
In their study “The creation of digital artefacts as a mechanism to engage students in studying literature,” Geoff Walton, Mark Childs, and Gordana Jugo investigate whether they can increase student engagement with their national literature using digital tools and methods to create “e-artefacts.” The study was implemented in classrooms in Croatia, Denmark, Poland, Sweden and the United Kingdom, and it was up to the teachers how the technology was incorporated into their curriculum. The researchers grounded their work in prior studies ranging from 1999 to 2016 that investigated student reading experiences, how technology supports learning, the importance of student creativity, and social constructivist approaches to teaching (1062-1063).
Due to the study taking place across not only school districts but in different countries, the researchers admit that the way teachers incorporated student technology use was different across the board. As such, the majority of their data was extracted from focus groups held with the “teacher practitioners,” which occurred at each of the different schools and promoted in-depth sharing of results and ideas. Additionally, researchers collected comments from students, but they were used “for illustrative, not analytical, purposes” (1065). This variance in implementation methods and the resulting dependence on purely qualitative data could be considered a limitation of the study.
While the researchers were unable to clearly determine whether the use of digital artefacts in the classroom increased students’ love for their national literature, they could pinpoint several positive results from the incorporation of technology with approaches to literary studies. They found that students enjoyed using the digital tools, collaborating with their peers, and having more agency in the creation of their coursework. Additionally, teachers witnessed an increase in student excitement as students delved deeper into texts to develop their digital artefact (1067-1070).
In many ways the study was a resounding success, but there were several limitations to the study. Different schools have different policies, and while some environments encouraged student collaboration, others (especially in the UK) struggled with this change in the orderliness of the classroom (1069). Teachers also struggled with the time constraints that come with incorporating new technology into their curriculum. Units took longer since they had to set up the technology and help students learn to use it before the work on the digital artefacts themselves could begin. Students also needed additional one-on-one attention, creating another time issue (1068). However, teachers indicated that these roadblocks could be worked around given more flexibility within their individual school standards, which they felt could be negotiated.
Ultimately, I do believe that this article will be helpful to my teaching. The study demonstrated that the use of digital artefacts in the classroom as an alternative approach to teaching literature can have many positive effects on student learning. Through the creation of the digital artefacts, my students would have to spend more time with the assigned text and close read it on a level they may not have done otherwise. This article highlighted potential obstacles to keep in mind—particularly in terms of time management—but I feel that with careful consideration these problems could be resolved.
Work Cited
Walton, Geoff, et al. “The Creation of Digital Artefacts as a Mechanism to Engage Students in Studying Literature.” British Journal of Educational Technology, vol. 50, no. 3, 2019, pp. 1060–1086., doi:10.1111/bjet.12785.
Reflection
What I found most interesting in this week’s assignment was that by examining various research articles to determine which study I would use, I was able to gain a better understanding of educational research as a whole—particularly action research. Additionally, I could detect trends in educational research across the different journals I consulted for this assignment. As a student in the English department, I do not have to engage with articles of this kind very often, so it took me a while to work through the structure of the document and how to interact with descriptions of methodologies and data. It was also interesting to see the appearance of social constructivism in practice in this article, as it helped me understand it differently than I did last week when reading about theory. Looking forward to the research proposal assignment, I now feel like I have better understanding of what that project will need to look like. I will definitely want to further investigate different methodologies for conducting educational research, and while I’m somewhat critical of this article’s use of self-reporting in focus groups as their primary method of gathering data, I’ll be interested to see more information on best practices for the gathering and use of qualitative data, quantitative data, or a mix of both in educational research studies.