| The value of robotics education(RE)currently is well and widely acknowledged,and RE in K-12 has been gradually introduced into the daily(or formal)teaching system to fulfil its educational potential.One important benefit of RE is that it can foster students' problem solving skills.Most robotics curricula are hands-on,encourage students to think and be creative and are based on problem solving.Due to the robotics multidisciplinary characteristics,it is inevitable for students to encounter various troubleshooting problems in RE which are usually complex,unpredictable,and open-ended.The hands-on experience with troubleshooting problem in RE is a good"catalysts" to enhance the participants' problem solving skills.However,studies on troubleshooting in RE are not deep enough yet.For example,what kind of troubleshooting problems that students may encounter during the learning process to make robot artifacts?How do different learning methods affect students'troubleshooting ability?Can collaborative learning improve student's troubleshooting ability?How to overcome the flaws of collaborative learning in RE,for instance,fixed roles,free-rider/social-loafer issue,etc.A quasi-experimental study was designed to understand the application and the effects of pair learning on troubleshooting ability.Participants were the students who were going to enter a high school in the fall semester of 2017.38 teenagers at the age of 15-16 participated in the experiment,and they were randomly assigned into two classes before the experiment:class A(experimental group,PLG),N=24;and class B(control group,ILG),N=14.Participants in PLG were freely divided into 12 groups,two students per group to learn robotics by using one set of Arduino kit.In contrast,each student used one set of Arduino kit to study robotics in ILG.We conducted a prior knowledge quiz before this experiment,and the result showed they were almost novices in robotics.Our approach is relevant not only to explore the troubleshooting problems that students encountered during the learning phase,but also to measure the effects of pair learning on each student's troubleshooting ability including cognitive load.This study enriches the existing studies with,firstly,addressing the necessity to learn about students' troubleshooting behavior in the process of learning to make robot artifacts,Secondly,proposing the framework to evaluate students' troubleshooting performance from two aspects:the process evaluation by observation while learning to make robot artifacts and the summative evaluation by the troubleshooting test at the end of the robotics course.Thirdly,conducting measurement of students' mental effort that they invested in the troubleshooting test,which reflects students' intrinsic troubleshooting performance.Lastly,conducting rigorous comparison when contrasting paired with individual learners.In the troubleshooting test,all students completed the test individually,which reflects every student's troubleshooting performance developed through the robotics course.Overall,findings of this study showed there was no significant difference on troubleshooting ability between PLG and ILG,which was different with most existing studies.Specifically,the results indicated that(a)in the process of learning to make robot artifacts,students in PLG did not lead to significant higher performance in troubleshooting than that of ILG;(b)in the summative test,the troubleshooting performance of students in PLG was similar with that of ILG.These findings suggest that collaborative learning did not always has the superiority over individual learning in RE,it depends on the evaluation methods,learning contents and instruction strategies adopted and characteristics of students,etc.Instructors need integrate process and summative evaluation to assess students' learning,and take cognitive load into account as an important factor to reflect students' performance. |
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