Article Preview
Top1. Introduction
Recent research in educational psychology has shown that students’ active engagement is the core of successful learning and a key factor behind academic achievement (Mäkitalo, 2016; Rajala et al., 2016). Integrating web 2.0 tools in the instructional design enhances student engagement through their features; e.g., sharing posts, engaging in discussions, collaborating in projects and other meaningful opportunities for learning. They provide the platform for generating new knowledge as students share relevant materials and acquire new ideas from the materials shared by their peers (Rogers et al., 2010; Webster, 2018 & Zhu, 2012). In higher education, students particularly need to learn not just academic concepts, “but more importantly the skills of acquiring, internalizing, applying and creating new knowledge” (Dewitt et al., 2015, p.27). Using Padlet as a web 2.0 tool in an academic course can thus promote positive learning experiences and trigger more engagement (Freeman et al., 2014 & Korkealehto & Siklander, 2018) 1. It can encourage students to interact and collaborate with their peers and thus help to enhance all aspects of classroom engagement. Students’ collaboration in online learning contexts creates a positive emotional and cognitive environment (see Dewitt et al., 2015; Korkealehto & Siklander, 2018; Majid, 2014; Siklander et al., 2017). This active engagement in classroom activities helps improve the learning environment and gets students more enthusiastic and motivated to learn (Shernoff et al., 2003; Freeman et al., 2014). While previous research mainly focuses on the correlation between classroom engagement and students’ academic performance, the aim of the present study is to focus on how students perceive their level of behavioral, emotional, agentive and cognitive engagement while performing learning and assessment activities on Padlet. It attempts to answer the following research question:
How do students evaluate and value the use of Padlet application as a learning and assessment tool during the sociolinguistics course?
In the next section, the four aspects of student engagement in online settings will be explored. Section 2 includes the research design, participants and data collection tools. Section 3 covers the analysis of the questionnaire and interview results while section 4 includes the discussion, conclusion and suggestions for future research.