Findings and Insights
Students commonly found that this learning
experience was fun, helpful, and/or conducive to improving their communication skills in Chinese, as illustrated in reflection data, a sample of their most frequent comments in their reflections and survey.
The results of survey and student's reflections support the following findings:
- With collaborations that involve the native speakers, students had real-life purpose and accelerated motivation to construct their knowledge and develop their language skills.
- The collaborative learning with the native Chinese students helped students learn the language more authentically and effectively.
- The hands-on learning activities in this project increased students' opportunities to use the language, induced a series of negotiations of meaning (Blake, 2000), and improved the quality of written and spoken language.
- Technologies in this project-based learning were used as engager and facilitators of thinking and knowledge construction:
- for representing students' ideas, understandings, and beliefs
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for producing organized, multimedia knowledge bases by students.
- Technologies served as context to support learning by doing:
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for representing and simulating meaningful real-world situations and contexts.
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for representing perspectives and stories of students' peers in China.
- Technologies served as information vehicle for exploring knowledge to support learning by constructing:
- for accessing needed information from China
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for comparing perspectives, beliefs, and world views.
- Technologies served as an intellectual partner to support learning by reflecting:
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for helping students to articulate and represent what they knew
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for reflecting on what they learned and how they came to know it
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for supporting mindful thinking and students' internal meaning making.
- Technologies served as social medium to support learning by conversing:
- for collaborating with others
- for discussing and building consensus among the members of a team.
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