Enhancing Student Competency and Engagement Through Microlearning: Effectively Scaffolding Skill Development

Learning technologies now exist that give students practice thinking critically and creatively, communicating and collaborating, and gaining an insight into their personal strengths and weaknesses. In the case of a technology called peerScholar, that exercise happens as students give feedback and then learn from feedback effectively. Giving effective constructive feedback and learning from the feedback applied to one’s own work are both very challenging tasks. If the feedback giver is not sensitive to the emotions their feedback may produce, the receiver will fight or flee the comments, rather than think about them and learn.
In the proposed work we will assess the impact of just-in-time microlearning to help students better understand the difficulty of the task, while also giving them clear guidance on how to perform the task effectively. One assessment will be based on the mining of archival data, the other will be based on qualitative research with a small group of informed students. We expect the addition of microlearning to an already effective process will enhance it further.

Faculty Supervisor:

Jim Hewitt

Student:

Partner:

Cogneeto Inc

Discipline:

Sociology

Sector:

Education

University:

University of Toronto

Program: