Case 1
Prior studies have highlighted the importance of General Education (GE) in reinvigorating higher education. In spite of the significant contribution of GE, students’ engagement in the course is also frequently negative. Formative e-assessment (FEA) is supposed to enhance undergraduates’ learning engagement due to the nature of formative assessment and the relative affordability of technology. A FEA intervention was included in GE foundation course tutorials which used Kahoot, Mentimeter and Google+. This study adopted a quasi-experimental design to demonstrate the effectiveness of FEA intervention on student tutorial engagement. At the end of one-term tutorial, two experimental groups and one control group completed a survey on course engagement and eight students from experimental groups attended two focus group interviews. The findings reveal that students in experimental groups were more engaged than those in the control group although the difference was not significant. Kahoot was perceived the most useful to engage students and Google+ was believed the least effective to engage students due to their unfamiliarity with it, examination-oriented learning attitudes, low course learning motivation, and time constraints.
Benefit
‘Kahoot could catch our attention easily because of its vivid setting and exciting music background. So, I like it very much and feel more willing to participate in class.’
‘I have the same feeling. Kahoot is entertaining and interesting. We burst into laughter when we found an unexpected answer provided by the app and have a deep impression of that question.’
‘The online poll using Mentimeter gave me a visual representation of the whole class’s evaluation on the sample assignment. I don’t always give a similar judgement, so when the inconsistency appeared, I would listen to my instructor more carefully and find out why and would pay more attention to the criteria which I had misunderstood or ignored in the process of writing the assignment.’
‘After I clarified the criteria of the e-journal through the online poll and conversation with my instructor, I got to know how much time and energy I needed to spend to write a decent journal. This expected investment made me handle the assignment confidently.’
Challenge
‘ I remembered that I could not use my iPhone to register in Google+ groups in the first class and figured out how to do that. The unfamiliarity with the Google+ made me reluctant to use it to communicate with my group members. We privately set up a discussion group in WhatsApp and discussed our project there.’
‘My participation in Google+ was not active and I have not read proposals from other groups, nor leave comments. It will not count for anything if I do this. I need to invest my time on the project itself instead of reviewing others’ work.’
‘ I don’t want the teacher to know about the process of our inquiry in case we made stupid mistakes which would give a bad impression to the instructor. This bad impression will affect her judgment on our group presentation. This is what we want to see.’