Evaluation Of The Effect Of Phased Guidance During Scripted Discussions Within Student Groups In Higher Vocational Education.

Abstract

This research builds on the research by Darabi, Arrastia, Nelson, Cornille, and Liang (2011) on grouped and phased discussions and on the research by Wise, Saghafian, and Padmanabhan (2012) on the amount of scripting that is optimal for learning reading behavior during a scripted discussion.
The aim of this research is to determine the effect of phased discussions on reading behavior of students in the higher vocational education. All participants in this study were students from the University of Applied Sciences of Rotterdam and were selected based on the subject. Students were randomly divided in groups and used a technology enhanced learning environment (TELE) to perform different assignments during the period of the subject. Half of the groups got the experimental training in which they used the TELE environment to have phased discussions about the reading assignments while the other half used the same TELE environment but with discussions that where not phased. Before and after the assignments the reading behavior was measured by monitoring their behavior during a reading test (reading time of relevant and non-relevant texts for the selected question). This was monitored using an application designed by Okkinga (2018).
No significant differences were found between the reading behavior of the students with and without phased discussions during this research. Therefore, in this experiment it could not be con-firmed that phased discussions in TELE have a positive effect on the reading behavior of students. More research should be conducted to find the optimal amount of phased guidance during group dis-cussions for students in the higher vocational education.

Date of Award	12 Apr 2021
Original language	English
Supervisor	Christian M. Stracke (Supervisor)