research articles on student centered learning

ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Is the student-centered learning style more effective than the teacher-student double-centered learning style in improving reading performance.

• 1 Department of Social and Behavioural Sciences, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon, Hong Kong
• 2 Department of Curriculum and Instruction, The Education University of Hong Kong, Tai Po, Hong Kong
• 3 Faculty of Business, Law and Art, Southampton Business School, University of Southampton, Southampton, United Kingdom
• 4 Faculty of Education and Science, Jiaying University, Meizhou, China

Appropriate learning styles enhance the academic performance of students. This research compares and contrasts the popular effect of teacher-student double centered learning style (TSDCLS) and student-centered learning style (SCLS) on one’s reading, including reading comprehension, inference, main idea abstraction, and reading anxiety. One hundred and fifty one students in grade 4 from three groups (two experimental groups and one control group) participated in the experiment with 18 weeks’ reading comprehension training. The results showed that, first, both learning styles contributed to students’ reading comprehension, inference, main idea abstraction, and reading anxiety. Second, the TSDCLS contributed more to reading anxiety, and the SCLS contributed more to reading comprehension. Both learning styles had similar effects on inference and main idea abstraction. From the correlation test, excluding the correlation between SCLS and reading anxiety which was not significant, all other effects were significant. These findings are discussed along with implications and ideas for future research.

Introduction

Reading comprehension is an ability to gain meaning from the given text through the interaction between word decoding process and background knowledge application ( Cain et al., 2004 ; Ahmed et al., 2016 ). Reading comprehension has received considerable attention as the ultimate goal for reading is to draw a mental image from the given text. The schema in linguistic learning (referred to herein as linguistic schema ) plays a fundamental role in reading comprehension through literacy knowledge search in readers’ knowledge bases. To be more specific, in reading comprehension, linguistic schema works on the reading process through cue retrieval (e.g., vocabulary meaning) from the mental knowledge structure to interpret and integrate selected new information into the existing knowledge base (e.g., Nassaji, 2002 ). In reading comprehension, besides general comprehension ability, the other relevant abilities (e.g., inference and main idea abstract) and reading affect (e.g., reading anxiety) also determine the process of reading comprehension ( Rai et al., 2015 ; Silva and Cain, 2015 ; Stanley et al., 2018 ).

Previous studies have confirmed that appropriate teaching-learning style enhances students’ academic performance ( Komarraju et al., 2011 ; Huang et al., 2012 ), while there remains a general paucity of research comparing the different effects of each teaching-learning style on reading comprehension and the determining factors. Specifically, the effect of different teaching-learning styles on reading performance is a long way from being known. The correlations between different teaching-learning styles and reading factors (e.g., reading comprehension, reading anxiety, inference, and main idea) await discovery.

Literature Review

Linguistic schema on reading process.

Linguistic schema is an individual knowledge base for the reading comprehension process which activates background knowledge from schemata to support reading problem-solving ( Freebody and Anderson, 1983 ; Hebert et al., 2016 ). It mainly works on cognitive reading abilities and cognitive affect ( Cain et al., 2004 ; Sorrell and Brown, 2018 ). As for cognitive reading abilities, past studies showed that linguistic schema enhances readers’ first language (L1) reading comprehension abilities (e.g., inference, main idea abstraction) through meaning-based interpretations of the printed text (e.g., Cain et al., 2004 ).

Teaching Style

Teaching style refers to a belief which teachers used in pedagogy explanation and knowledge transfer to students ( Grasha and Yangarber-Hicks, 2000 ; Hsieh et al., 2011 ; Prescott, 2014 ). Under the guidance of self-determination theory ( Ryan and Deci, 2000 ), teachers’ teaching performance was impacted by competence, autonomy, and relatedness. Extensive studies showed autonomy-supportive and controlling practices directly impacted teachers’ teaching style development (e.g., Balaguer et al., 2018 ; Codina et al., 2018 ; Collie et al., 2019 ). Both autonomy-supportive and controlling practices reflected teachers’ awareness of supporting students’ empowerment on knowledge acquisition, controlling action on feeling, and thinking. Therefore, the current study selected the autonomy-supportive and controlling practices as the framework for teaching style investigation. Moreover, extensive evidences showed teachers’ teaching style usually worked with students’ learning style, if teaching style matched learning style, students would achieve the best learning results than those whose teaching-learning style did not match due to decreased students’ academic anxiety, learning motivation, and task inattentiveness ( Naimie et al., 2010 ; Chen et al., 2011 ; Bartholomew et al., 2018 ). In general, based on self-determination theory ( Ryan and Deci, 2000 ), teaching style could be further divided into teacher-centered style and learner-centered style ( Edmunds et al., 2008 ; Tessier et al., 2010 ; Haerens et al., 2015 ). Teacher-centered style refers to a teachers’ domain teaching approach in which the knowledge transfer was from the teacher to students directly; teacher played the decision-maker role, which determined learning process and designed the learning environment ( Opdenakker and Van Damme, 2006 ; Kahl and Venette, 2010 ; Vasileva-Stojanovska et al., 2015 ). The learner-centered style reflected students who had high involvement in knowledge acquisition with which the teacher played a facilitative role ( Özyurt and Özyurt, 2015 ; Rogowsky et al., 2015 ; Bernard et al., 2017 ). Past studies showed learner-centered style had advantages in increasing students’ deep understanding on knowledge acquisition ( Lin, 2015 ; Hanewicz et al., 2017 ; Yamagata, 2018 ), learning motivation ( McCombs et al., 2008 ; Polly and Hannafin, 2010 ), and improved critical thinking abilities ( Ernst and Monroe, 2004 ; Cornelius-White, 2007 ; Şendağ and Odabaşı, 2009 ). In addition, past studies mainly investigated the effect of teaching-learning style in math, science, or engineering, a few studies examined the effect in the reading field. Therefore, the current study investigated the learner-centered style and investigated the effect on reading factors.

Impact of Different Learning Styles on Reading Comprehension

Two main learner-centered styles drew great attention in the existing literature but still attract debate in the context of reading comprehension: SCLS and TSDCLS ( Souvignier and Mokhlesgerami, 2006 ; Rance-Roney, 2010 ; Law, 2014 ). Past studies showed that the differences between two learning styles on academic performance mainly come from two factors: teachers’ instruction and students’ self-regulated learning. Although these two factors work[ed] cooperatively, they still reflect two distinct bodies in the learning process.

Teachers’ Instruction

Teachers’ instruction worked effectively on students’ reading comprehension through explicit guidance on key information or the application of reading strategies ( Rance-Roney, 2010 ; Law, 2014 ). Some researchers claimed that teachers’ direct guidance (i.e., providing explicit instructions on selected reading task) were more effective than implicit instruction (i.e., pure interactive discussion between students) ( Dole et al., 1991 , 1996 ). For example, Dole et al. (1996) reported that students with direct guidance from the teacher performed better than those who undertook SCLS in narrative and expository texts.

Students’ Self-Regulated Learning

There are two key factors to initiate and maintain readers’ self-learning; cognitive control and motivational control ( Boekaerts, 1999 ). On the one hand, researchers claimed that the provision of external structures to control cognitive and motivational regulation was effective in enhancing reading abilities during text comprehension (e.g., Boekaerts, 1999 ; Pintrich, 2000 ). For example, Souvignier and Mokhlesgerami (2006) reported that students under motivation control performed better in reading comprehension strategy application than the control group did. In a similar vein, previous studies identified that cognitive control enhanced readers’ performance in main idea abstraction and comprehension strategies’ application ( Lau, 2012 ; Lau and Chen, 2013 ). On the other hand, many researchers showed that the explicit instruction in self-regulated learning may reduce the beneficial effects on students’ learning (e.g., Dignath et al., 2008 ; Dignath and Büttner, 2008 ). In two meta-analyses, Dignath et al. (2008) found that risk may be involved when teachers tailor self-regulated instruction; this is because teachers may over-control readers’ cognitive process and motivational process ( Waeytens et al., 2002 ), and such intervention may reduce the effectiveness of self-regulated learning on students’ learning behaviors. There is no doubt that learner effect and teacher effect are both important in teaching-learning cycles. However, which learning style is more effective in enhancing reading comprehension and reading factors remains to be identified.

Reading Anxiety

In the case of cognitive affect response, reading anxiety mainly reflects the emotional experience in reading ( Saito et al., 1999 ). Reading anxiety refers to a distinct complex of self-perceptions, behaviors, and affective feelings related to text reading activity ( Saito et al., 1999 ; Lu and Liu, 2015 ). Reading anxiety has a close relationship with reading comprehension. High reading anxiety inhibits reading performance and passage recall ( Sellers, 2000 ; Rai et al., 2015 ). Different learning styles bring different learning experiences for the readers. For example, the teacher-centered learning style may leave learners feeling bored or disinterested in class ( Schaefer and Zygmont, 2003 ; Lee and Hannafin, 2016 ). However, the effect of the learner-centered style (e.g., TSDCLS and SCLS) on reading anxiety is still unclear. Therefore, research on which learning style is better to reduce students’ reading anxiety is timely.

Main Idea Abstraction

Main idea abstraction refers to an ability to abstract the mental message from the given test, which is the ultimate goal of reading comprehension. The main idea has a close relationship with reading performance, which in turn determines the reading process (e.g., reading speed) and how the readers can abstract/select the proper reading strategies from their knowledge bases ( Hebert et al., 2018 ; Stevens et al., 2019 ). Previous studies confirmed that main idea abstraction is a key factor of executive function in reading comprehension. Usually, a higher main idea abstraction ability predicts higher reading performance. Learning style is essentially a habit that is adopted during the reading learning process, how readers’ learning style impacts the ability to develop the main idea remains unknown.

Inference is a key ability in reading, which reflects readers’ ability to take in vocabulary knowledge and grammar knowledge in sentence reading comprehension ( Cain et al., 2004 , 2004 ). Inference is another important ability in reading executive function. Past researchers tried to improve readers’ inference ability to enhance reading comprehension (e.g., Bensoussan and Laufer, 1984 ), and studies confirmed that self-internal reading factors (e.g., vocabulary knowledge, reading strategies) predicted inference ( Cromley and Azevedo, 2007 ; Ahmed et al., 2016 ). Learning style, as an external factor of learning, determined the learning process; however, it remains to be established whether the learning style has a positive impact on inference.

The Current Study

There are two main aims of this research. The first is to compare and contrast the effectiveness of both SCLS and TSDCLS in enhancing readers’ reading experience, which includes overall reading comprehension performance, specific reading abilities (e.g., main idea abstraction and inference), and reading anxiety. Second, the research examines the relationship between each learning style as well as reading comprehension, inference ability, main idea, and reading anxiety.

Participants

Participants for the research were randomly selected from three Grade 4 classes. Of these classes, all students come from low socio-economic status families and the three selected schools were in suburban districts in China. In previous learning, all students’ learning curricula followed standard instructions designed and approved by China’s Ministry of Education. All students were randomly divided into different classes after they finished the registration procedure for the school program. Consent was obtained from students and their parents before the formers’ participation in the research. No participants have received any form of reading ability training. In total, 151 students with no special education needs and from low socio-economic status families were randomly recruited and randomly allocated to three groups. About 49 (25 boys and 24 girls, mean age = 10.12 years old, SD age = 0.61) participated in the TSDCLS group, and 52 students (26 boys and 26 girls, mean age = 9.98 years old, SD age = 0.79) participated in SCLS group. Finally, 50 students (28 boys and 22 girls, mean age = 9.82 years old, SD age = 0.67) formed the control group.

To examine the effectiveness of SCLS and TSDCLS in enhancing reading comprehension and reading factors, inference ability and main idea abstraction ability from the normal reading comprehension (NRC); NRC tests were used to measure students’ reading performance in primary school. The measurement details are listed in the following paragraph.

Normal Reading Comprehension

We examined students’ NRC reading abilities through three selected narrative passages (version 2015, version 2016, and version 2017), which were widely used, well-established, and with both high reliability (Cronbach’s α -coefficients yielded 0.90) and validity translation tests, which were applied to measure the Chinese children’s NRC reading ability in primary school from 2015 to 2017 ( Xia, 2013 ; Zhang, 2018 ). Each reading comprehension test had similar difficulty indicators (e.g., correct answer rate in all samples around China was 60%), and the maximum score for each reading battery was 30 with 12 items. Three items for the main idea had a maximum score of six, and four items (e.g., what is the target word meaning in the passage) for inference had the total maximum score of eight (two scores for each). One item for the detailed search was awarded a score of four, and the remaining four items had a total score of 12. The length of each passage was around 900 words, a total of around 2,700 words for all three reading comprehension tests. Version 2015 reading comprehension test was used for pre-test, version 2016 reading comprehension test was used for post-test, and version 2017 reading comprehension test was used for the delayed test.

Students’ reading anxiety was assessed by the Chinese Language Reading Anxiety Scale (CLRAS), which was developed by Zhao (2013) ; the original scale was developed by Saito et al. (1999) . The CLRAS contains 20 items on a 5-point Likert scale ranging from “ strongly disagree ” to “ strongly agree .” An example item is: “When reading a Chinese passage, I get nervous and confused when I don’t understand each word.” The scale assessed factors that may contribute to reading anxiety and considered students’ perceptions of the difficulties they encounter. A high score would indicate high levels of anxiety. The maximum mean score of the scale was 5 and Cronbach’s α for the scale was 0.90.

Research Design

We applied a quasi-experimental design to measure students’ performance in pretest, post-test, and lasting effect (hereafter, we called delayed post-test in the current study). First, we collected the consent forms from potential students and randomly selected students from three classes as our participants. Second, we randomly assigned a research design to each class. Random allocation resulted in 49 students in the TSDCLS group and 52 students in the SCLS group. The remaining 50 students were assigned to the control group. The control group received regular classroom instruction during the reading comprehension program training. The three classes were taught by one of the training tutors, who is also working as a part-time teacher in that school. All expectation teaching outcomes followed the curriculum outline design, which was approved by the Ministry of Education in China for both primary school and secondary school learning periods. Third, to control for irrelevant learning effects (e.g., NRC familiarity learning effect), we selected classical reading comprehension (CRC) for the study. The content structure of CRC is similar to straightforward poems, short works, and fresh but with lively literacy information ( Wang, 2016 ). Specifically, all CRC vocabulary has at least two different meanings: phonetic radical meaning and semantic radical meaning ( Shu and Anderson, 1997 ; Chen et al., 2016 ). Past studies in Chinese reading comprehension confirmed that CRC was a useful predictor of reading performance ( Shu and Anderson, 1997 ; Wang, 2017 ). For CRC learning materials, normally, students begin to learn CRC at grade 5 of primary school, which means that, at the time of this study, participants had not done any CRC tasks in normal school test or school learning. The difference between CRC and NRC is that most CRC texts are narrative passages, the average length of each sentence of NRC is longer than that of CRC, and the meaning of each character is unique in NRC. Both TSDCLS and SCLS students were required to learn 21 CRC passages from the textbooks. The total training duration was from late February to late June (18 weeks).

In terms of reading performance examination, the pre-test was held in late February. Before the experiment started, all participants received reading comprehension tests (2015 version) and questionnaires regarding reading anxiety and inference. Regarding the post-test, the 2016 version of the reading comprehension test was used, with the same reading anxiety survey and inference tests. At the delayed post-test, the 2017 version of the reading comprehension test was used, and with the same reading anxiety survey and inference tests.

Training Materials

Training materials comprise three components. Component 1 is a vocabulary list that listed all vocabulary meanings in CRC with higher frequency and the vocabulary that students were required to know from the textbook teaching guidance. For example, “举(ju3)”: meaning 1, “并列 (equal effect),” “举案齐眉 (husband and wife treat each other with respect)”; and meaning 2, “全 (all),” “举国同庆(Nationwide celebration).” Component 2 has 21 passages from the school textbook, which the students were required to learn during the training program. All learning passages are narrative passages, telling a story. For example, “邹忌讽齐王纳谏 (Zou Ji’s Advice to the King).” In each passage, a modern language translation in direct translation style is given under each sentence, which means that we provided each character’s meaning in the second line of the given sentence. In addition, we highlighted the points of difficulty (e.g., grammatical knowledge and vocabulary knowledge) in the initial instructions guide. Component 3 is the after-school exercise, where all items were selected from the textbook. The exercise included main idea abstraction, inference sentence meaning, and detailed information search.

Training Procedure

The major difference between the TSDCLS group and SCLS group is that those students in TSDCLS had more interaction with teachers, which followed the guidance of the TSDCLS ( Rogowsky et al., 2015 ). That is, in each lesson, teachers and students learn the given materials together. The teacher tries to get interaction with students on each kind of knowledge transfer. Specifically, the interaction between teacher and students mainly reflects in heuristic problem solving and knowledge recall through exercise, the average frequency of the interaction on each knowledge item was over four times.

For the SCLS group, at the beginning of each class, the teacher reminded students to read the guidance instructions carefully first and then asked students to learn the given passage, which was followed by the SCLS ( Dignath et al., 2008 ). The teacher would only instruct students if students encountered difficulties and raised their hands. If more than three students had the same question, the teacher explained the knowledge being sought. In each training session, the teacher started class with encouragement on students’ self-learning, which mainly used self-questioning, self-regulated learning, and self-problem solving. The average interaction frequency during the learning period was one time only for time instruction and asked students to move their eyes to exercises to continue learning. All learning materials in the TSDCLS and SCLS group were the same and included the direct translation in modern language, the difficult points, the characters’ different meanings recall notice, grammatical function, and so on.

For the control group, except the material of guidance instructions, all three components’ training materials were provided to control group’s students at the same learning period.

Descriptive Analysis and Comparison Reading Performance From Three Groups

For scores calculation, regarding the main idea test, we used items’ scores from the NRC. Then, we compared each reading factor performance in pre-test, post-test, and delayed post-test contexts.

Repeated ANOVA and four-way ANOVA were used for data analysis. From Table 1 , at pre-test, all three groups’ students achieved similar performance in NRC ( F = 0.30, p > 0.05), inference ( F = 0.15, p > 0.05), main idea abstraction ( F = 0.11, p > 0.05), and reading anxiety ( F = 0.49, p > 0.05). At post-test, three groups students performed significant differences in NRC ( F = 289.56, p < 0.001), inference ( F = 285.05, p < 0.001), main idea abstraction ( F = 112.63, p < 0.001), and reading anxiety ( F = 49.89, p < 0.001). Specifically, regarding NRC, SCLS students performed significant higher scores than TSDCLS students (Mean difference = 1.00, p < 0.001), TSDCLS students performed significant higher score than control group (Mean difference = 3.80, p < 0.001). Regarding inference, TSDCLS students had similar scores with SCLS students (Mean difference = 0.09, p > 0.05), control group students had significant lower score with TSDCLS (Mean difference = 2.45, p < 0.001) and SCLS students (Mean difference = 2.36, p < 0.001). Regarding main idea abstraction, TSDCLS students performed similar score with SCLS students (Mean difference = 0.02, p > 0.05), control group students performed significant lower score with TSDCLS students (Mean difference = 1.86, p < 0.001) and SCLS students (Mean difference = 1.84, p < 0.001). Regarding reading anxiety, TSDCLS students had significant lower score than SCLS students (Mean difference = −0.79, p < 0.001), SCLS students performed significant lower score than control group students (Mean difference = −0.85, p < 0.001).

Table 1 . Comparison means and standard deviations for three rounds of data collection from three different groups.

At delayed post-test, three group students performed significant differences in NRC ( F = 131.71, p < 0.001), inference ( F = 41.38, p < 0.001), main idea abstraction ( F = 65.15, p < 0.001), and reading anxiety ( F = 49.77, p < 0.001). Specifically, SCLS students performed significant higher score than TSDCLS students in NRC (Mean difference = 0.54, p < 0.05), TSDCLS students performed significant higher score than control group students (Mean difference = 3.39, p < 0.001). Regarding inference, TSDCLS students had similar score with SCLS students (Mean difference = 0.04, p > 0.05), control group students had significant lower score than TSDCLS students (Mean difference = 1.31, p < 0.001) and SCLS students (Mean difference = 1.34, p < 0.001). Regarding main idea abstraction, TSDCLS students got similar score with SCLS students (Mean difference = 0.03, p > 0.05). Control group students had significant lower score with TSDCLS students (Mean difference = 1.66, p < 0.001) and SCLS students (Mean difference = 1.64, p < 0.001). Regarding reading anxiety, TSDCLS students had significant lower reading anxiety than SCLS students (Mean difference = −0.95, p < 0.001), SCLS students had significant lower reading anxiety than control group students (Mean difference = −0.85, p < 0.001).

The Effect of Both Teacher-Student Double Centered Learning Style and Student-Centered Learning Style on Reading and Reading Factors

To further explore the effect of both TSDCLS and SCLS on reading and reading factors, we created two sub-variables for learning styles and examined the effect on reading comprehension and reading factors.

From Table 2 , in both the post-test and delayed post-test, the TSDCLS had significant positive correlations with NRC ( r pre-test = 0.27, p < 0.001; r post-test = 0.30, p < 0.001), inference ( r pre-test = 0.46, p < 0.001; r post-test = 0.28, p < 0.001), main idea ( r pre-test = 0.38, p < 0.001; r post-test = 0.34, p < 0.001), and reading anxiety ( r pre-test = −0.54, p < 0.001; r post-test = −0.58, p < 0.001), while for the SCLS, the SCLS had significant positive correlations with NRC ( r pre-test = 0.60, p < 0.001; r post-test = 0.49, p < 0.001), inference ( r pre-test = 0.43, p < 0.001; r post-test = 0.32, p < 0.001), and main idea ( r pre-test = 0.39, p < 0.001; r post-test = 0.34, p < 0.001), but the correlation between SCLS and reading anxiety was not significant ( r pre-test = −0.02, p > 0.05; r post-test = −0.07, p > 0.05).

Table 2 . The effect of learning styles on reading and reading factors.

We examined the effect of both TSDCLS and SCLS on reading comprehension and relevant reading factors (reading anxiety, main idea abstraction, and inference). The results showed that, firstly, the two experimental groups performed better than the control group in reading comprehension and three selected reading factors. Between TSDCLS and SCLS, the TSDCLS performed better in reading anxiety than the SCLS. However, the SCLS performed better in NRC than the TSDCLS. As for inference ability and main idea abstraction, two experimental groups had similar performance. Secondly, the TSDCLS had a significant positive correlation with reading comprehension and three selected reading factors, in which the results were consistent with the comparison test. However, the SCLS did not have a significant correlation with reading anxiety. We discussed this phenomenon later.

The Advantage of Teacher-Student Double Centered Learning Style

Reading anxiety depends on an individual’s perceptions of a threatening situation and their abilities in handling this threat ( Frenzel et al., 2016 ; Marsh et al., 2017 ). Students following the TSDCLS performed with less reading anxiety than those using the SCLS, which is consistent with those studies that indicated the positive effect of teachers’ support on students’ reading anxiety ( Pratt and Savoy-Levine, 1998 ). Firstly, as Beck’s team (1985) suggested, a lower level of reading anxiety may come from less threatening learning situations, which means that, in the TSDCLS, the teacher’s guidance could be regarded as supportive information for assisting learning. Second, the TSDCLS provides a clear teacher-directed learning track, which could facilitate students to coordinate a goal-directed strategy, thus minimizing threatening emotions and maximizing safety ( Beck, 1985 ). In the current study, in the TSDCLS, the teacher could guide students on how to learn CRC effectively and this teacher-directed learning track reduced students’ threatening experience on CRC learning. In addition, dialog interaction encourages students to solve reading questions at the time they occur, and teachers could immediately provide feedback. Third, the interactive situation may create a decentralized pattern of power, which may encourage students to have more incentive to engage in, and confidence in, knowledge search ( Mezirow, 2000 ). Thus, the threatening emotions might be eased and the teacher’s support may gradually boost their safety awareness.

The Advantage of the Student-Centered Learning Style

Better performance in the NRC test could be explained by two reasons. Firstly, the depth of processing theory shows that deeper encoding facilitates better memory retrieval compared with shallow encoding (e.g., Craik and Lockhart, 1972 ). In the current study, in the SCLS, with less teachers’ guidance, students were forced to make more effort to attain deeper and more levels of elaborating and associating the reading materials with their knowledge retrieval during training, which means they have more comprehensive understanding of reading knowledge (e.g., sentence structure, vocabulary meaning). In this case, they find it easier to retrieve more needed knowledge on a NRC task due to deeper encoding of memory cues. For example, when students need to accomplish a NRC task, they may recall target knowledge (e.g., phrases’ meaning) faster than students, who are exposed to the TSDCLS. Secondly, in the SCLS, students have more problem-solving opportunities to think about how to deal with reading tasks effectively, which means they may cultivate more useful reading strategies for reading comprehension practice. Specifically, with guided questions, students might be more likely to engage in retroactive elaborating on and encoding of learning materials where they tend to frequently regulate their learning strategies to use previously learned similar knowledge to tackle the problems at hand.

Similar Effect Between Teacher-Student Double Centered Learning Style and Student-Centered Learning Style

The findings of similar abilities in main idea abstraction in both TSDCLS and SCLS groups were partially consistent with previous studies (e.g., Stoeger et al., 2014 ), but contrasting with the findings of Mason’s (2004) study, which proved the preference of the SCLS over the TSDCLS in teaching main idea abilities. The equal effect of finding main ideas observed in the current study might be related to the involvement of similar probes (i.e. verbal and written prompts) in the TSDCLS and the SCLS, respectively. Morrow (1985) managed to establish that students’ abilities in retelling stories were facilitated when they were guided with verbal prompts. The explicit guidance in both TSDCLS and SCLS groups may facilitate students to pick out relevant information in supporting the summarization. This result informed the ability of main idea abstraction could be learned through the appropriate track of guidance, no matter the teacher-directed learning or students’ self-learning based on explicit instruction guidance. Under the correct track of guidance, students could increase the ability of main idea abstraction.

As for the equal effect of inferences in both groups, according to the direct and inferential mediation (DIME) model, background knowledge is a significant component for enacting inferences. Prior studies also proved that different kinds of background knowledge about the texts resulted in higher inference scores (e.g., Vidal-Abarca et al., 2000 ). In the current study, in the beginning, from the test and survey, students in both TSDCLS and SCLS groups had similar background knowledge in NRC. As a result, there might be a possibility that similar storage of background knowledge has equal effects on their inferencing abilities in both TSDCLS and SCLS groups. That is to say, the amount of background knowledge acquisition on reading comprehension was similar between TSDCLS and SCLS through training materials.

Other Effects From the Student-Centered Learning Style on Reading Anxiety

Results showed that the SCLS did not have a significant correlation with reading anxiety. However, the reading anxiety score decreased significantly at post-test and delayed post-test. The reason may be due to the students’ feelings of freedom when exposed to SCLS. In particular, during the CRC training, the reader increased other abilities, which decreased threatening feelings when they faced reading comprehension. The reason why the correlation between SCLS and reading anxiety was insignificant might be the compensation or interaction effect with other reading comprehension factors (e.g., word reading and metalinguistic knowledge), resulting in the insignificant correlation.

Limitations and Future Direction

Several limitations of this study should be stated. First, due to the cognitive ability of primary school students, we only measured the effect of learning style on narrative reading comprehension, while other types of reading text such as descriptive reading comprehension and argumentative reading comprehension need further exploration. Second, the current study examined the TSDCLS and SCLS, which are popular nowadays in teaching, while for the teacher-centered learning style, the effect may be different from the learner-centered style (e.g., TSDCLS and SCLS). Third, to the best of our knowledge, there is no standardized and independent scale for inference ability and main idea abstraction measurement. Therefore, for future studies, there is great potential to design a standardized research scale. In addition, this study only investigated students’ general reading anxiety. Previous studies showed that anxiety could be categorized into “trait” and “state” anxiety (e.g., Nelson et al., 2015 ; Waechter and Stolz, 2015 ). Different types of anxiety have different effects on individuals’ executive function (e.g., working memory, inference, and main idea); thus leading to different reading performance efficiencies (e.g., Hadwin et al., 2005 ). Therefore, it is promising to develop scales eliciting different types of reading anxiety. Next, the correlation between SCLS and reading anxiety was not significant, the potential compensation or interaction effect with other reading factors requires further investigation. The factors that decreased reading anxiety are still unknown. Lastly, the current study only investigated two perspectives’ (autonomy-supportive and controlling practices) effects on teaching-learning style; for other perspectives’, effects such as competences and relatedness should be further explored in the future.

Implications

The current study contributes to the correlation between TSDCLS and SCLS and reading comprehension from cognitive processing and affect. First, the SCLS with questions-probing learning materials could further strengthen reading ability development in previously-learned knowledge with some amount of learning foundation. The SCLS could trigger students’ metacognition based on the depth of cognitive processing. This result informed that SCLS increased students’ depth understanding of learning materials, based on the depth of processing model suggestions, more interaction between memory and knowledge acquisition resulted in higher academic performance. Second, it might be that teachers’ guidance in the TSDCLS could generate “safety signals,” thus easing students’ negative cognitive affect, such as decreased threatening feelings of reading anxiety. TSDCLS contributed more to students’ academic affective factors (e.g., reading anxiety) through interaction between teachers and students on problem-solving.

In conclusion, both TSDCLS and SCLS contribute to the development of reading comprehension performance and development of three selected reading factors (main idea abstract, inference, and reading anxiety). Specifically, TSDCLS contributes more in reading anxiety through reducing the threatening feeling, the SCLS leads to better performance in the reading comprehension task, and both learning styles have a similar effect on inference and main idea abstraction. The TSDCLS shows a significant correlation with reading comprehension, inference, main idea abstraction, and reading anxiety, the SCLS has a significant correlation with reading comprehension, inference, and main idea abstraction, and the correlation between SCLS and reading anxiety was not significant, which needs further exploration on the compensation or interaction effect between SCLS and other reading factors. Results implicated more interaction between teacher and students on knowledge acquisition and problem-solving could decrease the threatening situation feeling which contributes more to students’ affective factors development. SCLS contributed more to students’ knowledge of deep understanding.

Data Availability Statement

The datasets generated for this study are available on request to the corresponding author.

Ethics Statement

The studies involving human participants were reviewed and approved by Jiaying Social Science Research Ethics Committee. Written informed consent to participate in this study was provided by the participants’ legal guardian/next of kin.

Author Contributions

YD and SW drafted the whole paper and did data-analysis. WW and SP provided the comments and helped to revise the draft.

This paper was supported by the Faculty of Social Science of Meizhou City for 2019 project. Reference Number: mz-ybxm-2019018.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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Keywords: learning style, teaching-learning style, reading research, reading comprehension, intervention

Citation: Dong Y, Wu SX, Wang W and Peng S (2019) Is the Student-Centered Learning Style More Effective Than the Teacher-Student Double-Centered Learning Style in Improving Reading Performance? Front. Psychol . 10:2630. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02630

Received: 13 June 2019; Accepted: 07 November 2019; Published: 27 November 2019.

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2019 Dong, Wu, Wang and Peng. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Shuna Peng, [email protected]

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

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New research shows effectiveness of student-centered learning in closing the opportunity gap.

While, nationally, students of color and low-income students continue to achieve at far lower levels than their more advantaged peers, some schools are breaking that trend. New research from the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education (SCOPE) is documenting these successes at four such schools in Northern California —schools in which traditionally underserved students are achieving above state and district averages.

Earlier this year SCOPE released individual case studies of these schools as part of its Student-Centered Schools Study — funded by the Nellie Mae Education Foundation. Today, SCOPE has released the culminating research: a cross-case analysis and its technical report, a research brief and policy brief, and an interactive online tool for educators. Together, these pieces offer evidence of the positive impact of student-centered learning and practical hands-on tools educators can use to reflect on and develop their practice.

Student-centered practices emphasize personalization; high expectations, hands-on and group learning experiences, teaching of 21st century skills, performance-based assessments; and opportunities for educators to reflect on their practice and develop their craft as well as shared leadership among teachers, staff, administrators, and parents. These practices are more often found in schools that serve affluent and middle-class students. Schools that incorporate these key features of student-centered practice are more likely to develop students that have transferrable academic skills; feel a sense of purpose and connection to school; as well as graduate, attend, and persist in college at rates that exceed their district and state averages.

"The numbers are compelling," said Stanford University Professor and SCOPE Faculty Director Linda Darling-Hammond , "students in the study schools exhibited greater gains in achievement than their peers, had higher graduation rates, were better prepared for college, and showed greater persistence in college. Student-centered learning proves to be especially beneficial to economically disadvantaged students and students whose parents have not attended college."

"The products from this study not only provide the evidence that student-centered approaches work but practical tools for educators that can be used to foster meaningful learning that enables all students to thrive, especially low-income students and students of color," said Nick Donohue, President and CEO of the Nellie Mae Education Foundation.

The study also addresses the policy changes that are essential to student-centered schools, including funding, human capital policies, and implementation.

Transforming the kinds of learning spaces most needed by underserved students requires educators who are well-prepared to create authentic learning experiences, grounded in students’ experiences while addressing their gaps in knowledge and skills. Educators need strong pre-service training as well as ongoing support to ensure that they are meeting students’ needs.

Transforming schools requires adequate funding to attract and retain high-quality staff and to provide a rich set of curriculum experiences for students both inside and beyond the school. It also requires that federal and state governments support innovative schools more and mandate less; transform their assessment systems to support deeper learning; and develop systemic learning opportunities among educators, schools, districts, and other agencies. This is no small task, but the practices of the schools in this study—and the contexts that surround them—shed light on the types of teaching and policy supports needed to achieve these goals.

For more information, visit: SCOPE .

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Manja Klemenčič

Associate senior lecturer on sociology and in general education.

Student centered learning and teaching in higher education: student-centered ecosystems framework and student agency and actorhood

Klemenčič's work on student centered learning and teaching (SCLT) in higher education covers two areas.

Student-centred policies and practices in higher education - student centred higher education ecosystems

Klemenčič has investigated European policies and practices on SCLT both analyzing the theoretical underpinnings of policies and offering prescriptive advice. She introduced the concept of student centered learning and teaching ecosystems at the keynote talk during the 20th Anniversary Conference of the Bologna Process (in June 2019). With Sabine Hoidn, Klemenčič further developed the framework and published it as a conclusion to their co-edited Routledge International Handbook of Student Centered Learning and Teaching in Higher Education (Routledge July 2020). Klemenčič and Hoidn (2020) argue that 'SCLT processes are embedded in and enabled by broader institutional (and national and supranational) environments that consist of a variety of components and related elements – both human and material. These components and elements, [...], constitute student-centered ecosystems (SCEs). SCEs are defined as culturally sensitive, flexible and interactive systems of SCLT in higher education which exist both within higher education institutions and in higher education systems'. So the change from the teacher-centered to student-centered paradigm does not involve only a change in classroom practices, but rather conceiving and working on the number of elemnets that constitute the institutional (or system) student-centered ecosystem. The student centred ecosystems framework is also the backbone to the analytical report commissioned by the European Commission and co-authored with  Mantis Pupinis and Greta Kirdulytė and published in May 2020 by NESET, an international advisory network to the European Commission and the Publications Office of the European Union. 

Relevant publications:

Klemenčič, M. (2020) Successful Design of Student-Centered Learning and Teaching(SCLT) Ecosystems in the European Higher Education Area. In Bologna Process Beyond 2020: Fundamental Values of the EHEA - Proceedings of the 1999-2019 Bologna Process Anniversary Conference, Bologna, June 24-25 2019, edited by Sijbolt Noorda, Peter Scott and Martina Vukasovic. Bologna, Italy: Banonia University Press. pp. 43-60

Klemenčič, M., M. Pupinis and G. Kirdulytė (2020). Mapping and analysis of student-centred learning and teaching practices: usable knowledge to support a more inclusive high-quality higher education. NESET Report. Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union

Klemenčič, M. & S. Hoidn (2020). Beyond Student-Centered Classrooms: A Comprehensive Approach to Student-Centered Learning and Teaching Through Student-Centered Ecosystems Framework. In Sabine Hoidn and Manja Klemenčič (eds.) Routledge International Handbook on Student-Centred Learning and Teaching in Higher Education (Routledge)  

Student agency and actorhood in student centred learning and teaching

Klemenčič argues that shift to student centred learning and teaching in higher education has to focus on student agency as student capabilities to take responsibility for their learning and to influence their learning environments and learning pathways. This proposition corrects the existing theoretical underpinnings of policies on SCLT in higher education which are based on studnet engagement. Klemenčič analyzes the theoretical underpinnings of EHEA (European Higher Education Area)  higher education policies and corrects the conceptual bases on which they are based in her article From student engagement to student agency: conceptual considerations of European policies on student-centered learning in higher education (2017). Furthermore she conceptually advances the conceptions of  student agency and actorhood in SCLT with some prescriptive advice in a chapter  Students as Actors and Agents in Student-Centred Higher Education in the Routledge Handbook (2020). 

The conception of students as actors presupposes student agency which refers to students’ capabilities to actively participate in the learning-teaching processes and the design and implementation of the learning environments. In line with this definition, this chapter analyses student agency in SCLT in two distinct, yet interrelated domains. First, in line with constructivist education theories, the chapter explores issues of students’ autonomy, power relations between teachers and students and students’ responsibilities in learning and teaching processes in classroom environments. Second, drawing on perspectives from neo-institutional theories and HE politics, the chapter analyses student agency in institutional governance and administration of SCLT by exploring the concepts of power relations between students and institutional decision-makers/administrators, students’ sense of agency in and student impact on SCLT. Student agency is one of the central tenets of the contemporary scholarship on student-centered education and this chapter elaborates and advances the conceptions of student agency and actorhood in SCLT. The chapter also introduces a novel perspective on students as agents to bring about change in institutional strategies and culture toward more student-centeredness, a view that has so far been neglected in scholarship.

Klemenčič, M. (2020). Students as Actors and Agents in Student-Centred Higher Education.  In Sabine Hoidn and Manja Klemenčič (eds.) Routledge International Handbook on Student-Centred Learning and Teaching in Higher Education (Routledge) 

KLEMENČIČ, M. (2017). From student engagement to student agency: conceptual considerations of European policies on student-centered learning in higher education. Higher Education Policy 30(1) 2017: 69–85

KLEMENČIČ, M., ASHWIN, P. (2015). New directions for teaching, learning, and student engagement in the European Higher Education Area. In Remus Pricopie, Peter Scott, Jamil Salmi and Adrian Curaj (eds.) Future of Higher Education. Volume I and Volume II. Dordrecht: Springer

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• Published: 14 September 2018

Teachers’ roles and identities in student-centered classrooms

• Leslie S. Keiler   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-5640-2178 1  

International Journal of STEM Education volume  5 , Article number:  34 ( 2018 ) Cite this article

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Students and teachers in twenty-first century STEM classrooms face significant challenges in preparing for post-secondary education, career, and citizenship. Educators have advocated for student-centered instruction as a way to face these challenges, with multiple programs emerging to shape and define such contexts. However, the ways to support teachers as they transition into non-traditional teaching must be developed. The purpose of this study is to explore the impacts on educators of teaching in student-centered, peer-mediated STEM classrooms and preparing student peer leaders for their roles in these classes. Research questions examined how teachers think about themselves as they implement student-centered pedagogy, the difficulties they face as their roles and identities shift, and the ways they grow or resist growth. Qualitative research conducted at two urban secondary schools documents the diverse experiences and responses of teachers in an innovative, student-centered STEM instructional program. The experiences and perceptions of 13 STEM teachers illuminate the possibilities and challenges for teachers in student-centered classrooms.

All participating teachers described multiple benefits of teaching in a student-centered classroom and differences from traditional classrooms. Their transitions to this type of teaching fell into three major categories based upon past identities and current beliefs. Some teachers found the pedagogy consistent with preexisting identities and embraced it without radical change to their concepts of teaching. They described ways in which the model helped them become the teachers they had always wanted to be. Other teachers, who initially identified as deliverers of STEM content, had more difficult experiences adjusting to student-centered instruction. In one case, a teacher resisted change and exited the program, maintaining her identity and deciding not to become student-centered. Other participating teachers made dramatic shifts in their identities in order to implement the program. These teachers described significant learning curves as they shared responsibility for student learning with student leaders.

Conclusions

This study suggests that radically changing the learning environment can affect teachers’ identities and their approaches to teaching in predictable ways that can inform teacher education and professional development programs for STEM teachers, maximizing the success of teachers as they implement student-centered pedagogy.

Students and teachers in twenty-first century secondary STEM classrooms face significant teaching and learning challenges in preparing for post-secondary education, career, and citizenship. This preparation extends far beyond mastery of content knowledge, which has been the focus of traditional STEM instruction. The Partnership for 21st Century Learning ( 2015 ) includes Learning and Innovation Skills in its Framework for 21st Century Learning. They define these learning and innovation skills as creativity and innovation, critical thinking and problem solving, communication, and collaboration. The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) are consistent with this focus on twenty-first century skills. The argument for why the new standards are important states:

Science—and therefore science education—is central to the lives of all Americans. A high-quality science education means that students will develop an in-depth understanding of content and develop key skills—communication, collaboration, inquiry, problem solving, and flexibility—that will serve them throughout their educational and professional lives (NGSS, Lead States 2013 , Why section)

The National Council of the Teachers of Mathematics ( n.d. ) include in their Six Principles of School Mathematics concepts relevant to twenty-first century skills: 1) Teaching: “Effective mathematics teaching requires understanding what students know and need to learn and then challenging and supporting them to learn it well,” and 2) Learning: “Students must learn mathematics with understanding, actively building new knowledge from experience and previous knowledge” (p.2). The Partnership for 21st Century Learning defines learning environments that will support the development of these critical skills, requiring professional development that will facilitate a significant pedagogical shift.

Reasons for student-centered STEM instruction

Research about student-centered instruction in STEM, with students taking an active role in the learning process rather than being passive recipients of information from the teacher, demonstrates outcomes consistent with developing 21st century skills and STEM mastery. A variety of instructional models in STEM classes define themselves as student-centered (Boddy et al. 2003 ; Kazempour 2009 ; Moustafa et al. 2013 ; Odom and Bell 2015 ; Qhobela, 2012 ; Tamim and Grant 2013 ; Yukhymenko et al. 2014 ). Research about such models has tended to focus on the experiences of and outcomes for the students, which are largely positive in both cognitive and affective domains. Educators have used constructivist theory to develop a variety of student-centered instructional approaches, each with its own research base and consistently positive student impacts. Research about student-centered, constructivist classrooms documents increases in students’ higher order thinking, learning, and motivation, particularly in STEM classes (Boddy et al. 2003 ; Moustafa et al. 2013 ). Research about specific models highlights commonalities across constructivist, student-centered STEM learning environments. For example, inquiry-based instruction, grounded in constructivist theory, has yielded a variety of benefits for students including learning of STEM content and process skills, increased levels of engagement, positive attitudes about science, and enhanced non-cognitive skills (Juntunen and Aksela 2013 ; Kazempour 2009 ; Keys and Bryan 2001 ; Odom and Bell 2015 ). Problem-based learning (PBL), another student-centered approach that requires groups of students to explore real-world problems, has been shown consistently to increase performance in science courses and enhance science content knowledge, as well as improve critical thinking, student dispositions, student behavior, and attitudes about learning (Burris and Garton 2007 ; Gordon et al. 2001 ). Project-based learning (PjBL), a similar student-centered model that extends solving a problem to completing a project, has been linked to gains in student motivation, critical thinking, and academic skills in STEM classes (Tamim and Grant 2013 ). Further, research demonstrates that STEM classes that implement democratic science pedagogy support the development of critical science agency among participating urban students, which “opens doors for students to engage in science and to redress power differentials in their lives” (Basu and Barton 2010 , p. 86). This student empowerment, which happens in urban STEM classes focused on social justice, enacts Friere’s goal of student agency (Gutstein 2007 ). This set of examples from specific student-centered pedagogies illustrates a pattern of positive impacts of student-centered instruction in STEM classes. This diverse range of benefits across multiple studies and contexts justifies the increasing pressure on STEM teachers to implement student-centered instruction (Lew 2010 ), including in current teacher assessment systems (see Danielson 2014 ).

Teachers’ roles and responsibilities in student-centered STEM classrooms

Effective implementation of novel pedagogies requires understanding teachers’ roles and responsibilities in the transformed classrooms. The student-centered classroom literature defines the teacher’s roles and responsibilities in classes that employ student-centered pedagogies, including various iterations of constructivist and inquiry-based instruction. According to Moustafa et al. ( 2013 ), in constructivist classes “(t)he teachers’ role is to encourage and accept student autonomy and create a comfortable atmosphere for student expression,” acting as guides for their students (p. 418–419). Constructivist teachers behave in marked contrast to traditional instruction where teachers dominate the classroom and provide direct instruction focused on content knowledge acquisition. Friere saw teachers as partners of students who were pursuing agency as opposed to teachers being “positioned as enforcers, disciplinarians, and police officers” (Gutstein 2007 , p. 424). Teachers who implement democratic STEM pedagogy must learn to share authority with their students, enabling the student to make instructional decisions that the teachers support and enact (Basu and Barton 2010 ). Again, specific examples of research in several student-centered instructional models illustrate common themes of impacts of student-centered environments. Researchers describe teachers in inquiry-based classes as catalysts, who act largely through guiding questions (Juntunen and Aksela 2013 ). According to Yukhymenko et al. ( 2014 ), “In a PBL environment, the teacher is not the information provider or classroom controller. Rather, the teacher facilitates, coaches, and models good problem solving skills for their students” (p. 102). Tamim and Grant ( 2013 ) identified four roles of teachers in PjBL classes: reinforcer, extender, initiator, and navigator. Thus, across the literature, teachers in different types of student-centered classes take on, or are supposed to take on, the roles of facilitators and instructional managers.

In order to fulfill their new roles, teachers must shift their focus in the classroom from lecturing to assessing. Inquiry-based teachers become assessors because “it can help in diagnosing students’ prior knowledge, gauging students’ understanding throughout the learning experience and guiding instruction, and measuring their understanding and knowledge at the completion of the learning experience” (Kazempour 2009 , p. 56). In other words, “(t)he facilitator maintains the focus on learning, guides the process, meters the challenge, and provides appropriate feedback to each student and the whole group” (Gordon et al. 2001 , p. 171). This change in focus represents a dramatic shift from past practice.

The literature documents some of the challenges that teachers face when implementing student-centered pedagogies. Identified obstacles to becoming student-centered include concerns about time to cover the curriculum (Boddy et al. 2003 ; Kazempour 2009 ; Keys and Bryan 2001 ; Tamim and Grant 2013 ), anxieties over students’ performance on external exams (Kazempour 2009 ; Keys and Bryan 2001 ; Qhobela, 2012 ; Tamim and Grant 2013 ), resistance to change from traditional methods (Qhobela, 2012 ), peer pressure from other teachers (Lewis 2014 ), lack of flexibility in the classroom (Tamim and Grant 2013 ), tendency to teach as they were taught (Kazempour 2009 ; Lewis 2014 ), and apprehensions about classroom management (Tamim and Grant 2013 ). This literature focuses on the reasons teachers provide for resisting implementation, most of which focus on students, rather than what the teachers believed about themselves as they attempt to be student-centered. While there are some reports of teacher stress connected to reform-related curriculum that includes mandates for student-centered instruction, little literature addresses impacts on teachers as they implement student-centered pedagogy (Lewis 2014 ), the focus of the current study. As the teacher identity literature reviewed below indicates, understanding impacts of this dramatic environmental change on teachers’ identity is critical for understanding and affecting teachers’ instructional decision-making.

• Teacher identity

Beijaard et al. ( 2004 ) document the diverse meanings of teacher identity in the literature. For the purposes of this study, teachers’ roles refer to what teachers do in classrooms and teachers’ identities refer to the ways that teachers think about themselves and their classroom roles. This work builds on Grier and Johnston’s ( 2009 ) argument that, “Teacher identity is based upon the core beliefs one has about teaching and being a teacher that are constantly changing and evolving based upon personal and professional experiences” (p. 59). The current study expands the literature by examining how a particular pedagogy affects teachers’ identities as they learn to implement a new instructional model. Reviewing the teacher identity literature, Davis et al. ( 2006 ) argue that teachers’ personal histories and professional experiences influence their professional identity development. While teachers’ experiences are central to their identity development, these experiences are processed within a particular context and influenced by a community of practice (Freedman and Applement 2008 ; van den Berg 2002 ; van Huizen et al. 2005 ). According to Basu et al. ( 2009 ), “In our use of the term identity, we align ourselves with those who view identity as fluid and constructed socially within communities of practice” (p.360). Proweller and Mitchener ( 2004 ) argue that students play a central role in the development of their teachers’ professional identities. In the current study, students who act as peer leaders form a major component of the teachers’ communities of practice, increasing the complexity of the teachers’ professional context. Much of the research on teacher identity development focuses on pre-service teachers (Merseth et al. 2008 ; van Huizen et al. 2005 ) and/or early career teachers (Davis et al. 2006 ) across contexts, while the current study includes teachers across a range of professional experience in a particular instructional environment.

In another perspective on identity, Cohen ( 2008 ) argues, “teachers’ identities are central to the beliefs, values, and practices that guide their engagement, commitment, and actions in and out of the classroom” (p. 80). The literature demonstrates that past experiences affect teacher identity, which then modulates their pedagogical choices (Eick and Reed 2002 ; Rex and Nelson 2004 ). Thus, experiences shape teachers’ identities (Proweller and Mitchener 2004 ), and teachers’ identities affect their experiences as their identities influence their instructional practice. The current study uses this framework of evolving teacher identity to investigate the relationships among teachers’ classroom roles and responsibilities, the ways they think of themselves as professionals, and their attitudes and beliefs about their students. It explores the ways that a particular student-centered instructional model affects teachers’ identities and their classroom behaviors.

Study objectives

The purpose of this study is to explore the impacts on urban STEM teachers of preparing peer leaders for their roles in student-centered, peer-mediated classrooms and teaching classes through these peer leaders. Research questions examine how the teachers view their professional roles and identities as they participate in student-centered classes, the challenges they face as roles and identities shift, and the ways they grow or resist growth. The study explores these issues within the Peer Enabled Restructured Classroom (PERC) Program, in which typical high school students act as peer leaders in STEM classes, facilitating instruction on a daily basis. The PERC Program was developed to improve performance in STEM classes, increase high school graduation rates, and expand college readiness for non-honors students in urban schools. The ways in which teachers respond to the PERC instructional model contribute to understanding how to shift classroom practice toward student-centered instruction across multiple contexts. Thus, the research questions that guided this study were:

How do teachers think about themselves as they implement student-centered instruction?

What rewards and challenges do teachers experience as their roles and identities shift in student-centered classrooms?

Research design

Case studies (Yin 2014 ) of a program that implemented the student-centered PERC instructional model at two secondary schools were developed in order to answer the research questions, examining the diverse impacts of teaching in this context on teachers’ conceptions of their roles and identities. All 13 teachers who participated in the PERC program at the two schools were included in the case samples, in addition to their administrators, mentors, and coaches. Students were not considered participants because the data was not collected from them directly, although they were observed during PERC classes. Two schools were selected for exploration because, as Miles et al. ( 2014 ) argue, “multiple cases offer the researcher an even deeper understanding of the processes and outcomes of cases” (p. 30), although two cases still does not enable generalizability. The two current case studies used qualitative methods (Huberman and Miles 1994 ; Merriam 2009 ; Miles et al. 2014 ; Stake 2010 ) to inquire into issues of teacher identity and development. As Merriam ( 2009 ) argues, qualitative methods are appropriate when research questions focus on “(1) how people interpret their experiences, (2) how they construct their worlds, and (3) what meaning they attribute to their experiences” (p. 23). These characteristics were critical to the design of the current study. The case studies were descriptive explanatory in nature, seeking to describe and explain patterns related to the phenomena and relationships that influence the phenomena (McMillan and Schumacher 2006 ). The case studies are situated within a larger study of the diverse impacts of the PERC Program (see the “ Study Site and Participants ” section below) on schools, students, and teachers that is designed to make contributions to practice (McMillan and Schumacher 2006 ). The researcher acted as a participant observer (Creswell 2002 , 2013 ), as the PERC Director of Teacher Development, leading the professional development (PD) team and providing coaching to some of the teachers. This role provided deep and extended access to the study participants (Creswell 2002 , 2013 ). However, it did necessitate steps to avoid bias (Yin 2014 ) that result from researcher effects. Miles et al. ( 2014 ) suggest that researchers take steps to minimize bias such as including extensive time at the site, including participants with diverse views and experiences, checking emerging patterns with participants, and triangulation of data (McMillan and Schumacher 2006 ; Stake 2010 ). The researcher and PD team spent extensive time at the case schools. The three PERC coaches were at the case schools on a weekly basis collecting data as they supported the teachers’ development. The researcher visited the new school every week and the mature school once per month for a full school day, providing feedback to the teachers and coaches while working to increase fidelity of implementation across schools. The entire PERC PD team, including the Director of Teacher Development, the three PERC coaches, the TAS Pipeline Coordinator, and the Sustainability and Growth Coordinator, discussed the coaches’ observations and analyses, offering insights from multiple perspectives and experiences. This study included all teachers involved in PERC in the case schools to avoid selection bias. Preliminary study findings were presented to PERC teachers with various levels of experience in the program, coaches, TAS, and researchers working on different topics during a Summer Institute research presentation. The audience was asked to provide written and oral feedback about the findings, which were revised in response to suggestions.

The study incorporated a variety of data sources in order to facilitate triangulation (McMillan and Schumacher 2006 ; Stake 2010 ). The study focused on teacher interviews and focus groups in order to prioritize teachers’ perspectives about their experiences. Other data sources were used to contextualize and enrich the interpretations of the teachers’ claims and explanations. Teachers, administrators, and coaches participated in semi-structured interviews (Creswell 2002 , 2013 ; Kvale, 1996 ) and focus groups (Creswell 2002 , 2013 ; Krueger and Casey 2009 ) that enabled them to describe their own experiences and perspectives while staying focused on the context of the program under study. Interviews and focus groups were conversational in nature and included “probing questions to clarify and refine the information and interpretation” (Stake 2010 , p. 95). Data collection focused on the 13 mathematics and science teachers with experience in the PERC Program in these two schools. Individual interviews and focus groups were conducted during June before teachers began PD in the PERC Summer Institute, during August at the end of the Institute, and during October and May of each year of program participation. Interviews and focus groups lasted from 20 to 90 min, depending upon the teacher’s schedule and length of responses. Interviews and focus groups were recorded and transcribed. Program coaches observed teachers every week during their first year in PERC and either every week or every other week during teachers’ second year in the program, depending upon perceived needs for support. The coaches documented their observation with field notes using low inference descriptors , notes that describe events without evaluation (McMillan and Schumacher 2006 ), and an observation protocol completed by program coaches based upon PERC class target behaviors (see Appendix 1 ). The Director of Teacher Development trained each of the three coaches on how to take low inference notes and complete the observation protocol. Training involved joint observations by the Director and multiple coaches, who then compared and analyzed their documentation. Training continued until coaches reached 100% agreement on three joint observations, with monthly checks between the coaches and the Director to maintain levels of agreement. The PD team used this documentation to monitor fidelity of implementation of the model and establish PD goals for individual teachers and the program as a whole. Coaches uploaded completed observation reports into the PD team database and shared them with the teachers themselves. Coaches discussed teacher progress and challenges at half-day PD team meetings that occurred every other week, making plans for individual and collective teacher support. Data was collected across three years (2013–2014, 2014–2015, 2015–2016) in the mature PERC school and for the one year (2015–2016) of program participation in the school that was new to PERC.

Data analysis

Following Yin ( 2014 ), Merriam ( 2009 ), and Miles et al. ( 2014 ), the various data sets were analyzed and interpreted to develop findings, themes, and patterns. Pattern development was an iterative process, with codes emerging from the interview and focus group transcripts and then contextualized by the other data sets. The researcher analyzed the full range of data sets after each round of interviews adding to and modifying codes over the three years of the study. One PERC PD team meeting each semester was devoted to reviewing the preliminary findings in order to inform both the data analysis and the planning of teacher PD. The three coaches, the TAS coordinator, and the Sustainability and Growth coordinator provided verbal feedback about the consistency of the emerging patterns and findings with their experiences in the field. At the end of each semester, the PERC teachers were asked to confirm or refute preliminary findings, which were then modified based upon their responses. Thus, while a single researcher conducted the analysis of the raw data, the patterns and findings were reviewed and verified by multiple program participants.

Study site and participants

In the PERC Program, teachers and students collaborate to implement a novel instructional model that leads to improved STEM learning and performance (Thomas et al. 2015 ) as well as increased college readiness (Bonner and Keiler 2015 ) for students in high needs urban schools. A typical PERC lesson begins with whole class instruction and ends with individual formative assessment, but the majority of class time every day is spent with students working in small groups of approximately four students led by a peer instructor and supervised by the teacher. The PERC class structure is consistent with examples of student-centered instruction in the literature reviewed above. The peer instructors, called Teaching Assistant Scholars (TAS), are students who passed the STEM course and perhaps the associated high stakes exam the year before at a level that qualified them for high school graduation but not for college success. Teachers select TAS for the following year from their current students who have patterns of attendance and positive peer interactions that PERC has discovered leads to being an effective TAS. During the PERC lesson, the teacher, seven to eight TAS, and approximately 30 students engage in PERC class target behaviors ( Appendix 1 ) that support the learning and success of everyone in the classroom. TAS are responsible for ensuring that students are on task and learning throughout the lesson. TAS monitor their students’ developing mastery of the material, ask scaffolding questions, provide feedback, and serve as role models for appropriate academic engagement. In PERC class, teacher target behaviors largely involve guiding the work of the TAS and assessing TAS performance and student learning. Whole class, teacher-centered instruction is limited to 20% of class time. This classroom structure varies dramatically from traditional STEM classes, and teachers’ responsibilities within a PERC classroom diverge considerably from what they do in non-PERC classes.

In addition to their PERC classes, PERC teachers teach a course specifically designed for their TAS, which is part of the teachers’ regular instructional load and the TASs’ normal course schedule. The TAS class curriculum is divided into four components: learning to teach, learning to learn, learning content, and college knowledge. All components of the course are research-based. In learning to teach lessons, PERC teachers help their TAS learn how to support their students’ learning in PERC class through activities such as asking scaffolding questions, conducting formative assessment, and providing targeted feedback. Such tutoring-type experiences have been shown to have positive impacts on the peer leaders’ academic performance and self-concept (Ginsburg-Block et al. 2006 ; Komives et al. 2006 ; McMaster et al. 2006 ; Morrison 2004 ; Robinson et al. 2005 ; Roscoe and Chi 2008 ; Topping 2005 ). In learning to learn lessons, the PERC teachers work to develop the TASs’ own academic skills and self-regulation, focusing on goal setting, time management, and metacognition, which have been linked to college-ready skills and attitudes (Dignath and Büttner 2008 ; Greene and Azevedo 2007 ; Kistner et al. 2010 ; Perels et al. 2005 ; Schunk and Ertmer, 2000 ; Zimmerman 2008 ). Learning content lessons supplement the TASs’ incomplete mastery of the content developed the prior year and include advanced subject area exploration. Finally, in college knowledge lessons, the teachers guide the TASs’ investigation of what it takes to be admitted to and succeed in college and careers. Such college and career awareness has been linked to college success, especially for students in under-resourced urban schools (Cates and Schaefle 2011 ; McDonough 1997 ; Stanton-Salazar 2001 ; Tai et al. 2006 ). Of the four components, only learning content lessons in any way replicates the teachers’ prior experience and responsibilities. Across the course, teachers work with TAS to develop Conley’s ( 2008 ) academic knowledge and skills essential for college readiness. Thus, the TAS class requires the PERC teachers to engage in a completely novel instructional experience as they support their TASs’ development.

PERC student impacts

The PERC Program has demonstrated a range of impacts on participating students (Bonner et al. 2017 ; Bonner and Thomas 2017 ; Gerena and Keiler 2012 ; Keiler 2011b ; Thomas et al. 2015 ). TAS are much more likely to exceed passing scores and meet proficiency standards for college readiness after participating as peer leaders. For example, in 2013–2014, 47% of students reached the state college readiness benchmark after being a TAS as compared to 15% before this experience, with 14% achieving the state defined Mastery level post-participation compared to 1% pre-participation (CASE 2015 ). Further, preliminary analysis of TAS high school graduates suggests that about 73% of them enrolled in post-secondary education, far above the New York City average (CASE 2015 ). PERC students have also demonstrated positive outcomes on state examinations. For example, in the 2014–2015 cohort, Algebra I students were 1.6 times more likely to pass the Regents exam as matched peers in peer high schools (CASE 2015 ).

PERC Program professional development

In order to support teachers as they learn to implement the PERC and TAS classes, the PERC Program created a PD model using research-based best practices (Keiler 2011a ; Keiler and Robbins In Press ; Darling-Hammond and Richardson 2009 ; Ermeling and Gallimore 2014/2015 ; Gusky 2000 ; Gusky and Yoon 2009 ; Showers and Joyce 1996 ; Topping 2001 ; Tschannen-Moran and Tschannen-Moran 2011 ). The purpose of the PERC Professional Development program was to create a PERC community of practice within schools and across schools that, through teacher collaboration and inquiry, becomes well-versed in PERC. It was teacher-need driven and embedded in the daily work of participating teachers, fulfilling Gusky and Yoon’s ( 2009 ) concept of “just-in-time” PD. Since different forms of PD offer different strengths and are subject to different shortcomings (Gusky 2000 ), the PD model include a variety of experiences described below. Teachers who entered the PERC Program, regardless of how long they had taught previously, were referred to as Novice PERC Teachers . Novices participated in a 2-year PD program (see Appendix 2 ) once they joined PERC. The PERC Program has scaled in two ways, expanding to new schools and expanding within schools. Some schools, like the mature school in this study, started with a single subject area, adding teachers and subject areas each year until they reach capacity for teachers who want to participate. Other schools, like the study school in its first year in PERC, started with multiple teachers and subjects. In either instance, schools replace teachers who leave the school or the program to pursue other opportunities. Thus, PERC schools may have had teachers at different phases of the program, depending upon when each teacher began the program.

Teachers moved through the PD model in distinct phases: (1) introduction to the PERC Program, (2) PERC Program induction during the Summer Institute, and (3) academic year PD including school-based coaching and PD workshops. Teachers’ introduction to the PERC Program involved visits to PERC schools, where they observed classes and interacted with experienced PERC teachers and TAS. They were able to ask questions of PERC teachers and students, administrators, and PERC staff. These visits formed the basis of teachers’ decisions about whether to enter the PERC Program. These visits are essential as teachers are more willing to implement pedagogies they have observed in actual classrooms (Topping 2001 ). During the summer before their first academic year in the program, novice PERC teachers were immersed in the model during the 6-week, 4-days-per-week PERC Summer Institute. The PERC Summer Institute served as a PD lab for the program while providing remedial coursework for students who failed state exams in June and needed to retake the exams in August. Each day began with 1 h of TAS class, followed by 4 h of PERC class. Novice PERC Teachers’ summer experiences included (1) being mentored by a lead PERC teacher in a PERC class, (2) working with TAS summer interns to implement the class, and (3) being coached by the PERC PD team during and outside the PERC class. Additionally, during afternoon 2-h PD workshops, the novice PERC teachers learned TAS class routines and were introduced to the TAS class curriculum.

During their first year in the program, teachers received weekly school-based coaching that included observations of their PERC and TAS classes and hour-long coaching sessions that focused on teacher reflection and goal setting. During their second year, school-based coaching was either weekly or every other week, depending upon the PD team’s assessment of the teacher’s needs. During their third year and thereafter, PERC coaches visited each teacher once per month to continue to provide support and monitor fidelity of implementation of the model. PERC teachers formed a community of practice at their schools and joined a PERC teacher community across PERC schools. PERC teachers came together for monthly all-day workshops that enabled them to share successes and collaborate on meeting challenges. Additionally, teaching the TAS class and mentoring the TAS were PD experiences in and of themselves, as teachers developed as reflective practitioners when they taught pedagogy to and assessed the performance of their TAS. The PD team referred to teaching the TAS class as stealth PD because the coaches were able to shift teachers’ practice by having them teach desired pedagogies to their TAS, which led to the teachers implementing and reflecting upon the practices themselves. Once they developed mastery of the PERC and TAS classes, teachers could become mentors to new PERC teachers, further developing their skills in implementing the model as they grew as reflective practitioners.

Participants

All 13 teachers in the study (see Table  1 ) were certified in their field of instruction. They ranged in teaching experience from second year teachers to veterans of 13 years in the classroom when joining PERC. Eleven of the teachers were white and two black, all non-Hispanic, and four were female and nine male. Pseudonyms are used for all teachers. The 13 participating teachers had varying years of experience and levels of involvement in the PERC Program during the study. Nine of the participating teachers (Bill, Hillary, Jerry, Paula, Henry, Matthew, Alice, Andrew, and Lily) joined PERC and experienced PERC PD within the timeframe of the study. Their insights focused on this recent transition to PERC teaching. Two teachers at the mature school (Alan and Peter) were PERC teachers in the earliest years of the program, but had moved into other responsibilities within their schools and taught classes not in the PERC model during the time of the study. They were able to reflect upon their experiences becoming PERC teachers, their observations of the teachers in their school who replaced them in PERC classes, and contrast their PERC and non-PERC teaching experiences. One teacher (Mark) at the mature school experienced the PERC Program orientation, involving visiting PERC classes and doing a needs assessment with PERC coaches, in preparation for the following year. Mark contributed his predictions about what would be challenging for him and his insights about observations of PERC teachers in his school. One teacher (Bob) did not elect to become a PERC teacher himself, but teamed with a Special Education teacher (Henry) who did become a PERC teacher. Bob was able to compare his PERC and non-PERC classes and his role within those, even though he did not participate in PERC PD himself. These diverse experiences resulted in different quantities of contributions to difference aspects of the data sets and results discussed below.

The two study schools served students with demographics typical of the range of non-selective New York City public high schools (Table  2 ). In both schools, attendance rates hovered around 80%. The majority of students at both schools came from populations underrepresented in STEM, whether through ethnicity, family income, home language, learning needs, or some combination of these factors. Across the program, students in PERC classes were unlikely to have scored at the proficient level or above on their 8th grade Mathematics or English/Language Arts (ELA) state assessments, with fewer than 30% achieving this standard on the math exam and fewer than 20% on the ELA. Only 10% of entering PERC students had achieved proficient or above on both their 8th grade math and ELA exams. TAS had similar pre-PERC performance data, with less than 55% of them scoring at proficient in math and less than 20% on ELA in the 8th grade (Bonner and Keiler 2015 ). These characteristics qualified the schools for participation in the PERC Program, which targeted high needs schools that had struggled to meet the needs of students underrepresented in STEM.

All 13 participating teachers discussed ways in which being a PERC teacher differed from their previous teaching or their current teaching in non-PERC settings. The roles and identities that were special to teachers in PERC classes were common across participants. Similarly, the benefits to role shifts that teachers identified in PERC classes were shared among participating teachers. What differed among the teachers was how challenged they were by making the transition to the PERC model. Within this group of 13 teachers, seven (Bill, Jerry, Paula, Henry, Matthew, Alice, and Lily) described an easy transition, five (Alan, Peter, Mark, Bob, Andrew) described a difficult transition, and one (Hillary) did not transition at all, dropping out of the program after one year. Each of these teachers identified aspects of their experiences and identities that facilitated and/or impeded the transition. Similar patterns in teacher experiences appeared in both case study schools, with no observable differences appearing across sites. Thus, the results are reported together. Typical quotes from the themes that appeared in the data are used to illustrate each theme.

PERC teacher roles and identities

All PERC teachers in the study described experiencing changes in the roles they played in the classroom and shifts in their identities as teachers that accompanied these role changes. A major alteration involved the teachers’ roles and identities concerning content. Matthew, a veteran Algebra teacher, contrasted his roles in the PERC class with his non-PERC classes:

My role in PERC class is completely focused on how each group is progressing as far as working with their TAS and kind of randomly doing small observations of my TAS and trying to make sure that the kids are being challenged appropriately. Whereas in a non-PERC class I am just focused on content and making sure all my students are actually learning math from me . So it’s a completely different experience.

In Matthew’s PERC class, he focused on the students, whereas in his other classes, the students focused on him. In PERC, he assessed the students’ interactions with content, while in non-PERC, he delivered content himself. Similarly, in the PERC classroom, Andrew, a veteran Chemistry teacher, saw himself in a PERC class as, “Facilitator. A monitor. Also a big default go to, it’s even good to see the TAS sometimes, if they do make mistakes they’ll readily own up to it and they’ll say “OK,” and they’ll ask me over to be a corrector of sorts. And I am also there as an encourager.” All of Andrew’s descriptors focus on his interactions with the TAS and how he taught the PERC students through the TAS, acting as their manager and guide. While he retained the role of content expert in the classroom, his new identities mediated the ways in which he implemented that role, becoming a content resource rather than a content dispenser. Alan, a veteran math teacher, mirrored Andrew and Matthew’s prioritizing of students as he described refocusing his planning after becoming a PERC teacher: “you become aware of how much time you used to be spending worrying about what you are going to say rather than what the students are understanding.” This shift from focus on content to focus on students demonstrated a major change in the teachers’ thinking about themselves as educators.

PERC teachers had individual journeys through these identity transformations, but patterns exist across these journeys. For some teachers, participating in the PERC Program enabled them to embody their desired professional identities, resulting in a smooth and fulfilling transition within the classroom. However, some teachers’ pre-existing identities clashed with the ethos and structure of the PERC classroom. In the majority of these cases, the teachers underwent significant identity transformations as they embraced their new roles in the PERC and TAS classes. In contrast, one teacher’s identity remained intractably in conflict with PERC, causing stress for her and her students in PERC and TAS classes, as well as her coach. While this was less than 10% of the teachers who entered PERC, it poses an important challenge to program implementation and scale.

Embracing roles and identities

Being student-centered.

For many PERC Program participants, the experience was, as Matthew described, “a dream come true for a teacher.” Some of the teachers in the study had been waiting their whole careers to fulfill the roles they found in PERC, arguing that the PERC classroom enabled them to be the teachers they wanted to be. For example, Bill’s PERC coach described him as “a natural” because the PERC instructional model seemed to fit so seamlessly into his teacher identity, even as a second year Algebra teacher. Similarly, Bill’s school-based mentor described him as eager to learn and grow in the PERC Program because he valued the roles that it allowed him to play in the classroom. These easy adopters tended to be teachers who had wanted to implement groupwork in their classrooms, but they had previously been unsuccessful in getting students to remain productive while working in groups and usually reverted to teacher-centered instruction. Paula, a veteran Chemistry teacher, argued that she had always favored cooperative learning but that the typical classrooms behaviors of students she taught made implementation unrealistic. As a PERC teacher, supported by a team of TAS, Paula claimed that she was able to implement the kinds of lessons she had always desired.

Knowing what students are doing

Some teachers discovered additional, unanticipated benefits to implementing PERC. As Matthew explained, “I have a natural tendency to have students working in groups and have responsibility put on the students to focus and stay on task. So I feel like implementing this program is simple for me.” In non-PERC classes, he continued to ask students to work in groups but was never sure whether they were on task and learning when he stepped from one group to another, reducing his feelings of efficacy as a teacher. In particular, he worried about groups composed of English Language Learners who spoke their native language during class. When he did not speak the students’ language, he did not know if they were discussing math or their weekend plans. PERC made Matthew successful in his preferred instructional modality, increasing his feelings of self-efficacy as a teacher. He described the satisfaction he felt knowing that groups were discussing math with their TAS, regardless of the language they were speaking. Teachers such as these readily adopted the roles necessary to share responsibility for student learning with their TAS and felt fulfilled by their success within these roles. Such teachers experienced satisfaction rather than stress during these role shifts. They had wanted and waited to live the identity of facilitator of learning rather than fount of content.

Supporting individual students

In connection with the student-centered nature of the PERC model, PERC teachers described the ways in which the PERC Program enhanced their role of meeting the needs of individual students. While praising the program to potential PERC teachers, Matthew described the insider information that his TAS provided as part of their class discussions about grouping students to maximize success and minimize conflicts. Supporting this perspective, TAS claimed that it was easier for students to be vulnerable and share sensitive information with a peer who could then advocate for them with their teacher. As a second year Biology teacher, Lily argued that because the TAS were keeping all students engaged in PERC class, she was able to sit with groups, have in depth conversations, and support struggling students for extended periods of time. She believed that her role in the PERC class was to deepen the learning experience for individual students rather than ensure that all students were in some way on task. Through their work in PERC classes, participating teachers transitioned from an identity of a teacher of a class to an identity of a teacher of unique students.

In particular, special education teachers quickly embraced the PERC instructional model, while still experiencing significant role shifts. The two special education teachers in the study both taught at the new PERC school, with assignments including partnering with a content teacher in STEM classe into which students with special needs were mainstreamed. Henry was certified in special education and partnered with several different math teachers during his instructional day, including teaching one PERC Geometry class with Bob and one TAS class on his own. Alice was certified in special education and art, teaching several art classes on her own and one PERC Chemistry and one TAS class with Andrew. Employing his expertise as a special education teacher, Henry argued that the student-centered pedagogies of the PERC classroom were an excellent match for their target population, claiming that special education teachers had been attempting to get their general education partners to adopt such approaches for years. However, the two special education teachers also talked about the fact that the TAS were fulfilling many of the student support roles that they played in other classrooms. While this initially led them to question their place in the classroom, they soon realized that the TAS enabled them to employ their expertise in deeper ways. Alice, a veteran special education teacher, explained,

I guess it’s interesting what it does to the role of special education teacher because a lot of times my role when the gen[eral] ed[ucation] teacher is teaching content is conferencing or going around or doing behavior management, making sure kids are on task. All those sorts of things that TAS eliminate, so it actually really allows me to see what students are grasping things and work with them one on one or create strategies on the spot like regrouping or saying something differently or focusing on vocabulary.

Alice, like her colleagues, recognized the vital role she played as an assessor in a student-centered classroom. Eliminating subject expert as the primary role of teachers in a classroom also relieved pressure from teachers who preferred to focus on student learning instead of content. These special education teachers regularly changed subject partners from year to year, needing to master new content annually. The classroom culture of a community of learners matched the special education teachers’ identities of content learner as well, enabling them to feel more successful and useful in their PERC classes than in traditional classrooms. For some special education teachers, the structure of the PERC classroom and the emphasis on their expertise concerning student learning dramatically improved their relationships with their general education teacher partners. Henry, a veteran Special Education teacher, expressed frustration with content specialist partners who lectured the whole class, leaving no room for him as a learning specialist or pedagogies that he knew would be more effective with his population. Administrators and school-based coaches shared the improvements they observed in classroom dynamics and resulting learning opportunities for students of previously contentious teacher pairs. All PERC special education teachers described a true partnership role for them in the PERC classroom, which many of them had not experienced in many traditional classrooms where lecture dominated instruction. They believed that the changing pedagogies and values of the PERC classroom created positive identity shifts for all involved, students and teachers alike.

Teacher evaluations

PERC teachers talked about having been pushed by their administrators to implement student-centered classrooms, particularly because of the new evaluation system based upon the Danielson Framework (Danielson 2014 ). Although Alice claimed she had always had a student-centered approach to teaching as a special education teacher, she articulated the ways that implementing the model would make all teachers successful, “In terms of PERC it’s totally set up for a successful observation. It’s set up, it just looks right in terms of student-centered learning and interactions and all of that it’s totally where education needs to be.” Administrators shared how impressed they were with the dramatic improvement in observation ratings that their PERC teachers received. They claimed that they had urged their teachers to be more student-centered before with minimal results. Andrew, describing prior frustration, explained that he had never known how to make this work and that the PERC Program enabled him to embrace the identity of a highly effective teacher using current educational definitions. Similar teachers recognized the role shifts required by their changing profession and appreciated that the PERC model facilitated growth into a new identity.

Relinquishing undesirable roles

Another benefit PERC teachers described was that they got to relinquish roles they did not enjoy, as the TAS either adopted those roles or the presence of the TAS in the groups eliminated the role within the classroom. PERC teachers like Jerry, a third year Physics teacher, claimed that they were relieved to abandon their disciplinarian roles, as “classroom management problems disappeared.” He believed that the TASs’ ability to answer questions immediately and quickly refocus students’ attention on the learning task eliminated the need for a disciplinarian in his PERC classes. Lily, while acting as a mentor, explained to a novice PERC teacher that students in PERC classes were not bored because they got their questions answered immediately by their TAS. Bob, a veteran Geometry teacher, was only involved in PERC through his partnership with Henry, a special education PERC teacher. Bob contrasted his PERC and non-PERC classes, raving about what he was able to accomplish in his PERC classes and how much he struggled on his own in his traditional class, largely because of time on task facilitated by TAS. Alice described the reduction in dealing with behavioral issues that was usually a common role for her as a special education teacher, explaining, “I feel like I put out fires in lot of classrooms that I don’t have to in PERC.” The teachers described here seemed relieved that they were not having to focus time and attention on student behavior in their PERC classes at the expense of supporting student learning, which was common in their non-PERC classrooms.

PERC teachers also argued that the TAS removed roles related to simple explanations of content and procedures. For example, Paula articulated the value of the TAS in the classroom and the shift that it enabled in her role, claiming it was “good to have people take on additional responsibility for the small questions so I can focus on bigger misunderstanding.” She appreciated being able to use her content expertise in complex ways rather than spend time assisting students with basic content facts. Mark, a potential novice PERC teacher in the mature PERC school, predicted that the PERC model would reduce the time he spent repeating instructions to each student and enable him to have genuine conversations about the content he loved. As a veteran Earth Science teacher, he looked forward to shifting classroom roles by joining PERC. The elimination of undesirable, largely management roles enabled the teachers to take on more instructional roles in the PERC classroom, supporting their identity as a professional educator rather than a source of instructions and low-level content, and/or a disciplinarian. In fact, Lily claimed that she had progressed much farther in the curriculum during her first year in PERC than in the previous year because of being able to focus on content. Teachers spoke with enthusiasm about their work in PERC classes in contrast to frustrations they expressed about teacher-centered classes in which they constantly repeated themselves, never getting beyond rudimentary instructions or basic content.

A range of factors contributed to certain teachers making an easy transition to teachers’ roles and identities of the PERC classroom. Easy-transition teachers had pre-PERC identities that were consistent with a collaborative classroom culture in which TAS were trusted to share roles common to teachers in traditional classrooms. They did not value being disciplinarians and focusing on the minutia of content and task instructions. They wanted different relationships with their students and to spend time engaging with meaningful content understanding. Thus, easy-transition teachers felt fulfilled by their roles in the PERC classroom and had identities that led readily to success in the implementation of PERC.

Resisting the transition to student-centered instruction

While most teachers involved in the program ultimately embraced and succeeded with PERC, one teacher in the mature school was never able to adopt the model. Her identity was antithetical to the model and she remained resistant to change. Hillary, a veteran Algebra teacher, began PD in the PERC Summer Institute claiming that she had always been successful with having students sit in rows and she did not see why she should do anything differently, describing herself as “old school.” When asked what she meant by “successful,” she did not have an answer. During the summer, Hillary focused on tutoring individual students rather than learning how to collaborate with the TAS and implement the model with the entire class. She continued to hold onto her role as content expert and resisted becoming a facilitator and learning team manager. Her observation records demonstrate that most of her instruction remained teacher-centered, with little work being done in groups led by TAS. Few PERC target behaviors were highlighted, especially in the teacher column. Hillary’s coach reported that her TAS classes focused on re-teaching the TAS content rather than mentoring the TAS to develop the leadership and instructional skills they needed to implement the model with their groups. When the program did not work in her classroom during the academic year, she blamed the TAS, saying that she had not had a choice about which students were selected. Both her PERC coach and school-based mentor claimed that Hillary was unwilling to own any of the implementation problems or fully invest in making changes to the way she related to her TAS. Peter, her school-based mentor who was a veteran math teacher and a former PERC teacher, believed that Hillary ultimately did not believe in students’ ability to learn and grow. Peter had experienced a challenging transition himself, working to overcome his affinity for explaining mathematics in order to give students space to master the content with their TAS. Ultimately, according to his coach, Peter’s belief in students facilitated his transformation from a content-deliverer to a facilitator of an instructional team. Hillary’s journey through the PERC Program was complex. While she reported that she had initially been skeptical about the basis of the program—“students teaching students”—Hillary claimed that the program had “won her over” when she saw TAS from her school performing at a high academic level and fulfilling leadership roles in the PERC Summer Institute. However, while she was able to see these benefits to experienced TAS, she never embraced mentoring the TAS and developing their skills and expertise as part of her role as a teacher. Still, Hillary expressed gratitude for her PERC participation, claiming that she had become a better teacher because of her inclusion of groupwork, getting students to talk with each other, and making students explain their thinking in her post-PERC classes. While Hillary made some pedagogical changes based upon her experiences, she did not embrace the multiple roles and identity transformation required of a successful PERC teacher and exited the program.

Biggest transformations

Becoming believers.

While some teachers already possessed or readily adopted identities in line with being a PERC teacher and one did not change, a third group of teachers experienced dramatic identity transformations when implementing the model and achieved success in the PERC Program, executing the model in a way that demonstrated the PERC target behaviors and developing strong mentoring relationships with their TAS. The biggest transformations happened for teachers who entered the PERC Program with lecturing as their preferred mode of instruction. As students, they had been successful learners in that class format and felt competent as lecturers themselves. They loved their content and truly enjoyed explaining it to others. This is why they entered teaching, and it is where they got their greatest professional satisfaction. Teachers with content expert identities genuinely did want students to learn, frequently explaining concepts over and over in an effort to impart the content. Lily, mentoring a reluctant novice PERC teacher during the Summer Institute, shared that one of her own PERC mentors initially had a hard time believing that students could learn anything that did not first come out of her own mouth. This experienced PERC teacher’s transformation gave Lily insight into typical teacher struggles, making her an empathetic and effective mentor herself. For teachers such as Lily’s mentor, their primary identity in the classroom was content expert, and their role was of explainer. Yet, when these content-expert teachers seriously examined the outcomes of this traditional classroom structure for their students—from daily engagement levels to high stakes test performance—they acknowledged that something was not working. Content-expert teachers usually attributed the lack of success in their traditional classrooms to the students, claiming that they were different from the students in suburban schools with whom they themselves had been educated. A principal almost bragged, “Our students have very low tolerance for mediocre teaching.” Thus, these educators realized that it was not that the teachers needed to become more effective lecturers. Instead, the students required a completely different, student-centered pedagogy, one embodied by the PERC Program that involved different roles for teachers as well as their students.

For some content-expert teachers, epiphanies happened quickly. In cases such as Andrew, the first visit to a PERC class yielded a dramatic response, “Within the first 15 minutes I knew that this is what our school needed.” For others, their first summer immersion in the student-centered PERC classroom, surrounded by student success and dominated by TAS leadership, made skeptical teachers into believers. Such teachers commented on the fact that all the students in the PERC classroom were engaged and claimed that they believed that more learning was happening than in other classrooms they had observed. These initially uncertain teachers were committed to student success and ultimately believed that the PERC Program would facilitate that within their schools. They had needed to see it in action in order to believe that peer-led learning could be effective with students in urban classes, but seeing was indeed believing for them.

Learning to implement

While most participating teachers claimed that their induction into the PERC Program convinced them that the model would be effective for their students, that did not mean that the ultimate transformation in identity and practice was easy. Some teachers described feeling like a “novice,” a term the program adopted for PERC teachers during their first summer in order to prepare teachers for that experience. Some participating teachers articulated a significant amount of struggle with learning to trust their TAS, like Alan admitting, “it is hard to let go the first couple of years.” As Andrew shared,

I think the difficulty is the relinquishing of responsibility, sometimes I find myself wanting to say more. And it’s, although I have got better as the year has progressed this year, being able to shut my mouth, but sometimes I feel like an over bearing parent, “No No No don’t do it that way” instead of what you are supposed to do, let the students make mistakes and learn from that.

Andrew describes this group’s common struggle with transitioning from an identity as content expert to an identity as learning manager.

Some participating teachers initially seemed to believe that the TAS had taken over their role in the classroom, making them feel superfluous or redundant. During PERC class observations, such teachers appeared lost in the classroom during groupwork components of the lesson. Observation records for their lessons include a great deal of evidence of TAS success during groupwork but almost no comments about teacher actions during this major lesson component. Teachers who struggled in this area had relinquished their previous role of content specialist but had not yet adopted a teaching team manager identity. In response to such observations and expressed concerns, coaches worked with these struggling PERC teachers to be more active in the classroom. The coaches modeled the PERC teacher roles and provided explicit guidance and encouragement, both during class and in coaching sessions. Teachers who embraced this coaching made dramatic progress in their transformations, taking on new roles in the classroom that developed their identities in relation to teaching the TAS. For example, just over halfway through his first year in the program, Andrew positively glowed as he explained, “I’ve just had one of those days that makes life worthwhile.” That day he had allowed his TAS to take over the PERC class completely, from starter problem to exit slip. During the PERC lesson, Andrew assessed the TAS using the district’s teacher evaluation framework (Danielson 2014 ), giving them feedback during TAS class and asking them to write reflections about their own performance. Having abandoned his identity as repository of content knowledge, he reveled in his new identity as mentor of his TAS. Further, Andrew shared that his TAS whom he had taught previously were surprised about his different demeanor in the PERC classroom, indicating that he was not as hard on his students this year. He clarified that, “It’s more of a pastoral learning environment than bark-bark-bark,” explaining to his TAS that he relied upon them to play the role of taskmaster in their groups. Similarly, Alan had to learn that he had an important role to play in the PERC classroom as the TAS were leading content exploration—that of assessing student understanding. Once Alan shifted his identity, he claimed that he was doing a lot more listening and assessing. He believed that this new role ultimately had more impact on student learning because in his former role, he was largely ignorant of what the students had actually learned. Teachers like Alan found a new way to utilize their content expertise through their relationships with their TAS. They shifted from believing that the content is the most important thing in the room to believing that the students were the priority. While such participants reported struggling with learning to implement the model, they tended to seek ways to improve their own effectiveness with being a PERC teacher. They adopted an identity as a learner within the PERC Program.

Mentoring TAS

PERC teachers also discussed the new roles that were involved in developing their TAS from marginally successful students to academic leaders. The entire PERC community recognized the challenges of accepting this new role and the shifts required to develop the identity of TAS mentor. As one PERC coach explained, “It’s not just show up and put on the t-shirt and you’re an amazing TAS. There’s a development involved.” One principal argued that effective PERC teachers needed to be analytical thinkers who understand how students learn so that they can teach that to their TAS. When asked what had been difficult about becoming a PERC teacher, Matthew admitted that while the structure of the PERC class was easy for him to implement:

I have struggled through different points of the year with the maturity development of the TAS and their responsibility. Teaching them to be focused and to not fool around with each other has been something that has come up a couple of times and that we worked through, and that’s part of their maturity and development as a person.

However, Matthew embraced this mentoring role and wanted to continue working with his TAS during the summer to ensure their successful progress through the curriculum. These participating teachers appreciated the challenge of developing this new identity of supporting the development of the TAS, acting as their mentor and not just their content instructor.

This study enriches and enhances prior research about STEM teachers’ identities in student-centered classrooms. The language PERC teachers used as they described themselves, their roles and identities, reflects the student-centered rather than teacher-centered structure of the PERC classroom. Their descriptions match the roles the literature ascribes to STEM teachers in student-centered classes (Gordon et al. 2001 ; Juntunen and Aksela 2013 ; Kazempour 2009 ; Moustafa et al. 2013 ; Tamim and Grant 2013 ; Yukhymenko et al. 2014 ) reinforcing what teachers, administrators, teacher educators, and professional developers should expect and prepare for as STEM teachers transition to student-centered instruction. Through their experiences in the PERC Program, participating teachers took on identities much more complex than the ones they had previously embraced, which had focused on being STEM content experts. Whereas in their previous classroom identities involved a single focus on content and delivering it to a single entity of the class, their new identities required them to focus on the learning of each individual student in their classroom and how to be an appropriate teacher for this multiplicity of learners. The difficult-transition teachers who struggled with their concern over content were similar to STEM teachers in the literature who worry about having time to cover the curriculum (Boddy et al. 2003 ; Kazempour 2009 ; Keys and Bryan 2001 ; Tamim and Grant 2013 ) or student exam performance (Kazempour 2009 ; Keys and Bryan 2001 ; Qhobela, 2012 ; Tamim and Grant 2013 ) in student-centered classes. Yet, all but one teacher in this study were able to make the transition. They learned to prioritize the identity of assessor described in student-centered literature (Kazempour 2009 ; Yukhymenko et al. 2014 ) rather than content dispenser typical of traditional, teacher-centered STEM classrooms. Participating teachers described their identities as shifting away from being the focus of the classroom towards a more supporting role, transitioning from being the instructional star to being the director of learning. These insights are consistent with and further illuminate previous work in this field.

While many of the participating PERC teachers’ experiences were compatible with the literature, some of the teachers’ claims suggested that the PERC model addressed implementation concerns of teachers in other student-centered STEM programs. For example, participating PERC teachers argued that classroom management issues disappeared in PERC classes because TAS kept students engaged, preventing both frustration and boredom within their groups. This belief that PERC improved student behavior contrasted with prior studies of teachers in student-centered programs who worried that losing the teacher-centered structure worsened student behavior (Tamim and Grant 2013 ). Working in classes where every student was engaged was the favorite aspect of being a PERC teacher for many participants. Additionally, PERC teachers’ belief that PERC increases the amount and complexity of content addressed in classes contrasts to studies where teachers believed that student-centered instruction poses challenges for curriculum coverage (Boddy et al. 2003 ; Kazempour 2009 ; Keys and Bryan 2001 ; Tamim and Grant 2013 ).

The current study consisted of two case schools involving 13 STEM teachers. While this enabled patterns to emerge across teachers and sites, it limited the depth of exploration of any single teachers’ experience. A case study of an individual teacher would allow detailed analysis of the trajectory of identity transformation that was not possible while working with 13 teachers. The study was set in two schools implementing a specific student-centered instructional model. Further, the study involved STEM teachers in STEM classes, which limits generalizability to teachers in other subject areas. It is impossible to determine how much of the impacts that the teachers describe are attributable to specific factors of the PERC model and what might be generalizable to other student-centered approaches. The two case schools were both urban schools serving students with limited past academic achievement and coming from backgrounds underrepresented in STEM. Further research would be needed to determine whether teachers in more affluent schools, or suburban or rural schools, or those serving students with prior academic success would experience the same types of transformations. The current case studies identify issues worth pursuing in other contexts and with other programs.

Current PD programs tend to focus on what teachers need to do in their classrooms while neglecting the affective impacts that changing pedagogies might have on the participating teachers. As the current study demonstrates, the ways that new pedagogies affect teachers’ identities and the match between teachers’ existing identities and those required by the new pedagogies strongly affect teachers’ ability to adopt and adapt to student-centered instruction. Further research is needed to help teachers and administrators make appropriate choices about PD that supports identity transitions. The PERC Program has begun to use the insights from this study to shape teacher selection and PD experiences for novice PERC teachers. Early discussion of the PERC Program with prospective administrators and teachers now includes transparency about the challenges as well as benefits of becoming a PERC teacher and participating in a student-centered classroom. The PERC Summer Institute has added specific experiences designed to facilitate teachers’ transition from focusing on content to focusing on students and supporting TAS. Research is being conducted on these experiences to determine their impacts on teachers who enter the program with varying teacher identities.

This study contributes to the discourse about the complex interactions between STEM teachers’ experiences and their professional identities. It demonstrates that radically changing the learning environment can affect teachers’ identities and their approaches to teaching. Teachers who entered the PERC Program predisposed to identifying themselves as coaches or facilitators experienced minimal stress as they learned to develop and mentor their TAS. Teachers who saw themselves as content deliverers experienced a more radical shift in the ways that they thought about themselves in the classroom after joining PERC. Teachers who made the identity transformation learned to value different experiences in the classroom, redefining teaching to include more roles. These identity changes led the teachers to gain insights about the individual learners in their classroom, seeing the adolescents’ true potential as learners and peer leaders. These changes in the PERC teachers’ identities had positive impacts on their students.

PERC teachers’ identity development involved interactions with peers and administrators, students and coaches. In the PERC Program, TAS played a central role in the teachers’ community of practice. As the participants crafted a new type of teacher-student dynamic (Keiler and Robbins In Press ), teachers expanded their identities from teachers of STEM to developers of human potential. Particularly for teachers who initially struggled, PERC coaches played a vital role in facilitating the risk taking in the classroom that led to identity changes. When the teachers trusted their TAS and delegated responsibility to them, they were rewarded with engaged students and high functioning classrooms that resulted in positive evaluations from administrators. These positive outcomes sustained most teachers through the challenges of implementing new pedagogies and teaching a completely novel course, making the new identity of being a learner worthwhile. The teacher whose identity was too rigidly fixed to allow her to collaborate with her TAS did not truly implement the model and did not have the experiences necessary to facilitate change. For the majority of PERC teachers, the PERC Program’s classroom structure and requirement to focus on the development of the TAS had substantial impacts on the ways that the participants thought about themselves as STEM teachers.

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A student-centered approach using modern technologies in distance learning: a systematic review of the literature

• Nurassyl Kerimbayev 1 ,
• Zhanat Umirzakova 1 ,
• Rustam Shadiev 2 &
• Vladimir Jotsov 1 , 3  

Smart Learning Environments volume  10 , Article number:  61 ( 2023 ) Cite this article

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A literature review was conducted to develop a clear understanding of the student-centered approach using modern technologies in distance learning. The study aimed to address four research questions: What research experience already exists in the field of the student-centered approach in distance learning? What modern technologies are used in distance learning, and how are they related to the student-centered approach? What are the advantages and limitations of implementing the student-centered approach and modern technologies in distance learning? What recommendations can be derived from existing research for the effective implementation of the student-centered approach and modern technologies in distance learning? The purpose of writing this review article is to provide a comprehensive overview of the student-centered approach using modern technologies in distance learning and its advantages. To conduct this review, a Web of Science and Scopus database was searched using the keywords “student-centered approach,“ “modern technologies,“ and “distance learning.“ The search was limited to articles published between 2012 and 2023. A total of 688 articles were found, which were selected based on their relevance to the topic. After the verification and selection process, 43 articles were included in this review. The main results of the review revealed that the student-centered approach to learning took various forms or was defined individually, and there were significant differences in the main research findings. The review results provide a comprehensive overview of existing studies, advantages and limitations of the student-centered approach using modern technologies in distance learning as well as examples of successful implementation in various educational institutions. The article also discusses the challenges that online and distance learning may pose to the student-centered approach, the modern technologies that support the student-centered approach, and suggests ways to overcome these challenges. The role of technology in facilitating the student-centered approach in online and distance learning is analyzed in the article, along with recommendations and best practices for its implementation. The student-centered approach is gaining increasing attention and popularity as a means to address these issues and improve the quality of online and distance learning.

Introduction

The student-centered approach is a teaching and learning method that places the needs and interests of students at the center of the educational process. It emphasizes engagement, collaboration, and student autonomy, aiming to create a learning environment that supports, challenges, and aligns with students’ needs and goals. In his research, Khoury ( 2022 ) argues that this approach has a positive impact on student motivation, active engagement and improved learning outcomes, especially in online and distance learning settings.

Modern education strives for active learning, where students become the center of the educational process and develop their skills and competencies (Katawazai, 2021 ). However, the implementation of this concept is difficult due to various problems, including lack of infrastructure and limited resources. Despite this, the use of modern information technologies, especially distance learning, provides enormous opportunities for the application of this concept, where the teacher plays the role of a mentor, helping students develop learning motivation and stimulating their independent learning activities (Haleem et al., 2022 ; You, 2019 ). In the realm of education, there is a significant discourse surrounding the idea of prioritizing students in the learning process, involving them actively, and tailoring educational experiences to their needs and interests. Numerous studies, including those by Bakar et al. ( 2013 ), Neumann ( 2013a , b ), and Komatsu et al. ( 2021 ), explore diverse facets of this educational approach. These investigations delve into topics such as crafting learning environments that revolve around the learner and the hurdles faced when translating this concept into practical implementation.

Student-centered learning (SCL) involves active student participation in the educational process and the ability for students to choose what, when, where, and how they will learn. In the field of teaching statistics, there has been a rapid expansion in the use of SCL. However, despite this, there is a lack of research that synthesizes the results in this area, particularly in the context of computer technologies (Judi & Sahari, 2013 ). Schweisfurth ( 2015 ) emphasizes the importance of flexible learning methods, and (Oyelana et al., 2022 ) highlight active participation, individual attention and motivation. Research Lahdenperä et al. ( 2022 ) shows that teacher support and control of learning tasks promote regulated learning. Asoodeh et al. ( 2012 ) further confirm that a student-centered approach improves academic achievement and social skills. However, the successful implementation of this approach requires changes in the organization of the educational process and teacher training, as indicated in the study by Burner et al. ( 2017 ). At the same time Tadesse et al. ( 2021 ), Zhang et al. ( 2022 ) and Knorn et al. ( 2022 ) emphasize the importance of interactive and constructivist learning, providing a deeper understanding of the material.

Theoretical framework e-learning

A student-centered approach to e-learning involves orienting the educational process towards the needs and interests of students. This approach assumes that students actively participate in their own learning, define their learning goals, choose ways to achieve these goals, and independently assess their progress (Kumar & Owston, 2016 ). In the context of the accessibility of e-learning, a student-centered approach can be used to identify accessibility issues that cannot be automatically detected. In a student-centered e-learning environment, various tools and technologies are used to help students acquire knowledge in a more interactive and effective format (Santoso et al., 2016 ; Verstegen et al., 2016 ; Dolmans 2019 ; Rodrigues et al., 2019 ). For example, chats, forums, web conferences, online quizzes, and assignments allow students to communicate and collaborate with each other, exchange ideas, and receive feedback from teachers and fellow students (Serban & Vescan, 2019 ). Advanced methods, tools, and technologies are applied to create a SCL process on electronic platforms. Special attention is given to the use of machine learning methods and data analysis to personalize the educational process according to each student’s needs and level of knowledge. Santoso et al. ( 2018 ) also provide a description of the development and testing process of a control panel, which demonstrates that its use can improve the quality of learning in a student-centered e-learning environment.

Kerimbayev et al. ( 2022 ) investigated the implementation of the I-learning platform in the education system and emphasized the advantages of this innovative platform, which contributes to improving the quality of education and facilitating collaboration between teachers and students. The article also highlights the importance of integrating technology into education to enhance the quality of education and prepare students for modern employment requirements.

Methods and technologies of e-learning with a focus on a student-centered approach are described by Uskov et al. ( 2014 ), who discuss the creation of an individual electronic educational environment that can be tailored to the needs and knowledge level of each learner. The application of intelligent technologies to enhance student learning is emphasized. Various methods and approaches, such as adaptive learning, personalization of the educational process, the use of online courses, and other electronic tools, are employed. Faisal et al. ( 2019 ) propose the use of machine learning methods and data analysis to create personalized educational materials and improve interaction among students.

In the age of the Internet, traditional lectures are becoming less appealing to students, leading to a decrease in their motivation for learning and exam performance. However, widespread adoption of student-centered teaching methods aimed at addressing this issue faces certain obstacles, such as: (1) difficulties related to preparing materials for e-learning; (2) significant additional time required for active online communication with students; (3) resistance from students towards taking an active role in their education; (4) insufficient confidence of teachers that a student-centered approach covers all necessary topics. Dȩbiec ( 2017 ) describes a thematic study conducted in an introductory course on digital systems using a combination of student-oriented strategies to overcome the mentioned obstacles and improve students’ performance. Specific measures included: (1) improving student-teacher relationships; (2) using inductive and counterintuitive approaches to introduce new concepts; (3) the use of puzzle-based quizzes integrated with peer learning; (4) use of the audience response system; (5) replacing some lectures with educational programs; (6) reducing the course duration; and (7) utilizing a graphic tablet.

Student-centered e-learning involves the use of technologies that allow teachers and students to personalize learning, such as data analysis and adaptive learning. Courses are developed considering the interests and needs of students, which can enhance their motivation and learning efficiency. Student-centered e-learning also involves the use of interactive teaching methods such as assignments, cases, group discussions, and presentations, which enable students to actively participate in the learning process (Hermans et al., 2013 ). Student-centered e-learning helps ensure a high level of individualization in education and enhances learning effectiveness. As a result, students can receive quality education that meets their needs and helps them achieve their learning goals. It has been established that online courses require the application of more effective learner-centered teaching methods. This approach allowed students to choose assignments they prefer, including both traditional projects and more active actions such as demonstrations or skill mastery. To determine the extent to which these changes contributed to active learning, course data analysis was conducted. Students successfully completed assignments, demonstrating proficiency in various skills, and positively evaluated the flexible learning approach. Hanewicz et al. ( 2017 ) confirmed that using student-centered methods that consider their preferences is an effective approach for online courses.

Background: online learning

The impact of a student-centered approach to online learning on student satisfaction, particularly for those with limited experience in online education, has been studied. Researchers focus on constructs such as teacher-student interaction, active student participation in discussions and assignments, personalized learning, and others. Structural equation modeling was employed to test hypotheses regarding the influence of five key elements of SCL in online courses: learner relevance, active learning, authentic learning, student autonomy, and computer competency on students’ perception of satisfaction with online courses and distance learning (Ke & Kwak, 2013 ; Ribeiro-Silva et al., 2022 ). The results demonstrated that all five SCL structures significantly influenced student satisfaction with online courses and distance online learning.

To develop effective online courses, it is important to utilize research-backed principles and practices that are student-centered and can be theoretically justified and explained based on empirical data. It is crucial to identify evidence-based practices that have proven effective in attracting and retaining students in online courses (McCombs, 2015 ). Student-centered online environments serve as important tools for education in the modern world, providing students with access to educational materials anytime and anywhere, as well as offering a convenient and flexible learning format (Rayens & Ellis, 2018 ). Such an approach can improve the quality of learning and enhance student motivation, ultimately leading to more effective and successful education.

A personalized approach to online learning in higher education takes into account the individual cognitive and motivational characteristics of each student, unlike universal approaches that do not consider these differences. This allows for more effective enhancement of student motivation, self-esteem, self-efficacy, intrinsic values, and improves the quality of education and preparation for professional activities. However, the personalized approach may not have a significant impact on students’ course-related performance and task value. Data analysis can also provide more detailed information about students’ learning behavior and help develop further intervention strategies to improve the quality of education (Smit et al., 2014 ).

Smit et al. ( 2014 ; Figueiró & Raufflet, 2015 ) investigated the application of self-determination theory in establishing an educational setting centered around students. Their multilevel analysis revealed that students in this environment exhibited elevated levels of perceived autonomy, competence, relatedness, and motivation, gauged by their enjoyment and effort. When autonomy is granted within a nurturing context, a learner-focused approach can enhance student motivation.

Some higher education institutions are transitioning from a traditional teacher-led model to a student-centered model. However, this process is happening slowly due to the lack of clear instructions and trust in teachers. Yap ( 2016 ) investigated the challenges schools face in this process and the influence of a student-centered model. Various student-centered teaching methods have been examined, but insufficient attention has been given to what teachers themselves can do to achieve this model. Different technologies, such as online learning and multimedia, have been presented as supportive tools for this model. The study also presents a SCL model that includes key strategies and clear recommendations for teachers. The traditional teaching model was compared to multimedia and online learning in terms of their impact on student understanding and motivation, using pre-tests, post-tests, surveys, and student feedback (Bonnici et al., 2016 ) to inform how the modality and style of online learning can be improved and adapted to student needs.

Related work with distance learning

Currently, as virtual learning becomes increasingly popular and widely used in various fields, including education, it becomes important to ensure effective interaction between learners and technologies in virtual learning environments. To achieve this goal, a student-centered approach is necessary, which allows for individualizing the learning process, taking into account the needs and interests of each learner.

The interaction between learners and technologies in virtual learning environments is an important topic in the field of e-learning. It encompasses various aspects such as interfaces and usability, accessibility of materials, feedback and support, collaborative work and communication, as well as the ability to personalize and customize learning (Borba et al., 2018 ). Technologies used in virtual learning environments can impact the effectiveness of learning and stimulate active student engagement in the learning process. For example, modern technologies such as online forums, video conferences, and mobile applications can provide a more flexible and convenient environment for communication and collaboration among students and instructors. Chui et al. ( 2020 ) discuss the use of machine learning in virtual learning environments, specifically the creation of personalized learning plans for students. Machine learning algorithms can be used to analyze student data, such as test scores and system activity, and based on that, create individualized learning plans that take into account each student’s unique needs and abilities.

Kerimbayev et al. ( 2020 ) discussed the use of the learning management system (LMS) Moodle as a virtual educational environment to enhance interactive communication in education. The authors discussed the advantages of this approach in facilitating collaboration among students and instructors and improving overall education quality. The study demonstrated the effectiveness of LMS Moodle in creating an interactive and engaging learning environment.

Practical approaches to virtual learning environments in the context of distance learning and online education have been explored. Various aspects of virtual learning environments, including their definition, history, and evolution, the technologies used, learning models and methods, as well as research related to the effectiveness of virtual learning environments, have been discussed (Flavin & Bhandari, 2021 ). Different aspects of virtual learning, such as its effectiveness, accessibility, usability, and technological challenges, have been examined. Almarzooq et al. ( 2020 ) also discuss the advantages and disadvantages of virtual learning compared to traditional classroom-based learning, considering virtual learning as an effective tool for educating medical professionals both during the pandemic and in the long term.

Marín-Díaz et al. ( 2022 ) analyzed how universities transitioned to virtual learning, the technologies used, and how it impacted the educational process and student engagement. They also examined both the positive and negative aspects of virtual learning and discussed future development possibilities for virtual learning environments. To enhance student self-efficacy in virtual learning through mobile educational applications, Hussain et al. ( 2021 ) described key approaches to improving student self-efficacy in virtual learning using mobile apps and provided recommendations for their use. They also discussed the impact of mobile educational apps on improving students’ confidence in their knowledge, skills, and abilities, as well as increasing their motivation to learn.

The use of artificial intelligence technologies that explain decision-making in virtual learning environments to make learning more student-centered is also discussed. The principles underlying explainable artificial intelligence and the application of machine learning and data analysis methods to enhance student-virtual learning environment interaction (Alonso & Casalino, 2019 ; Laužikas & Miliūtė 2021 ). The role of explainable AI in improving assessment and providing feedback to students in virtual learning environments is also explored. This includes online courses, webinars, virtual classrooms, interactive textbooks, etc., which can involve both synchronous (real-time) and asynchronous (non-real-time) learning. Virtual learning can be beneficial for distance learning in blended learning programs that combine both traditional and virtual teaching methods (Jotsov et al., 2021 ). Numerous studies focus on the effectiveness of virtual learning and the optimization of teaching processes in virtual environments. Aslan and Duruhan ( 2021 ) conducted research on the impact of a virtual learning environment developed based on a problem-oriented approach to teaching on students’ academic performance, problem-solving skills, and motivation. The results showed that the use of problem-oriented virtual learning environments improved students’ academic performance, problem-solving skills, and motivation compared to traditional teaching approaches. Skalka et al. ( 2019 ) developed a system for automated assessment of programming skills using virtual learning environments. Their study compared the effectiveness of automated assessment with traditional manual assessment methods in programming education. The results showed that automated assessment using virtual learning environments was more effective than traditional manual assessment methods. This study highlights the potential of virtual learning environments for automated assessment and improving programming education.

It can be seen that the use of e-learning has increased significantly since 2012 and continues to grow (Fig.  1 ). Specifically, in 2023, the highest usage was recorded for “Virtual learning,“ followed by “Online learning” and “e-learning.“ Additionally, it is worth noting that the usage of “Virtual learning” reached its peak in 2023, while the usage of “Online learning” and “e-learning” continues to rise. Regarding scholarly articles, it can be inferred that the number of articles on this topic correlates with the popularity of these learning modalities. The highest number of articles was published in 2023, while the lowest was in 2013.

Growth and use of e-learning (Online learning, Virtual course of study, e-learning) from 2012 to 2023

This Table  1 provides a description and characteristics of three learning modalities: e-learning, online learning, and virtual course of study. It allows for comparing their differences, advantages, and features. For each learning modality, their main characteristics and distinctive features are provided. For example, e-learning involves the use of computer programs and can be both a standalone form of learning and a complement to tradition

Research gap and study objective

Currently, despite extensive scientific discussion, research issues related to the concept of a student-centered approach and the successful integration of student-centered educational tools when using various educational technologies in the context of e-learning remain the subject of active discussion and research. Several systematic reviews and meta-analyses have attempted to evaluate the effectiveness of a variety of educational technologies in creating learning environments that are tailored to students’ needs and interests. Shehata et al. ( 2023 ) conducted a systematic review of literature reviews to assess the current state of student-centered learning facilitated using educational technology. Ochôa and Wise ( 2021 ) discuss the role of student-centered analytics in supporting the digital transformation of education. Zhang et al. ( 2023 ) examine student-centered learning in the context of the case method and conduct an analysis of online and offline discussions within this teaching method. Shemshack and Spector ( 2020 ) conducted a systematic review of terminology associated with personalized learning. Yang et al. ( 2023 ) focused on student engagement in the context of emergency distance learning. Khaldi et al. ( 2023 ) conducted a systematic literature review on gamification in e-learning in higher education.

A study by Yang et al. ( 2018 ) evaluates the effectiveness of smart classrooms and highlights the importance of integrating technology into the teaching process. While the study by Peng et al. ( 2019 ) focuses on a personalized adaptive learning approach implemented using smart learning environments. Both of these studies are highly relevant for better understanding the impact of modern educational technologies on teaching methods and contribute to the creation of more personalized educational scenarios.

Conducted research Mustafa et al. ( 2023 ) examines the impact of gamification on students’ online learning behavior and academic performance, taking into account the perspective of learning analytics. Huang et al. ( 2023 ) work explores educators’ readiness to implement Online Merge Offline (OMO) learning in the context of digital transformation. At the same time, Topuz et al. ( 2022 ) considered current trends in online assessment systems in the context of an emergency transition to distance learning. Kerimbayev et al. ( 2023 ), is engaged in the development of computational thinking in online collaborative learning using educational robotics. Wang et al. ( 2022 ) examined the temporal aspect of gender differences in online learning behavior. These studies make important contributions to the understanding of various aspects of modern educational technologies and their impact on learning and teaching.

Research Objective: The aim of this study is to conduct a systematic literature review on the topic of “Student-Centered Approach and Modern Technologies in Distance Learning.“ The main objective is to analyze and summarize existing knowledge and research on this topic to identify key trends, advantages, limitations, and recommendations regarding the student-centered approach and the use of modern technologies in distance learning.

Research Questions:

To achieve the stated research objective, the following questions are formulated:

What research experience already exists in the field of the student-centered approach in distance learning?

What modern technologies are used in distance learning, and how are they related to the student-centered approach?

What are the advantages and limitations of implementing the student-centered approach and modern technologies in distance learning?

What recommendations can be derived from existing research for the effective implementation of the student-centered approach and modern technologies in distance learning?

The study will focus on seeking answers to these questions and providing a comprehensive literature review that will assist researchers, educators, and practitioners in the field of education to develop strategies and methods for the effective implementation of the student-centered approach and modern technologies in distance learning.

Methodology

Use of modern technologies.

The use of modern technologies in a student-centered approach in education is an important and promising area of research. Modern technologies, such as artificial intelligence, virtual reality, adaptive systems, and chatbots, can significantly enhance the educational process, making it more personalized, interactive, and effective.

One of the main advantages of using modern technologies in a student-centered approach is the ability to individualize learning. Adaptive learning technologies allow for the adaptation of educational materials and teaching methods to individual needs and preferences of each student. This facilitates more effective comprehension of the material, increases student motivation, and fosters interest in learning.

Furthermore, the use of modern technologies promotes active student engagement and the development of collaborative work. Virtual environments and tools enable students to collaborate, exchange ideas, solve problems together, and develop communication skills. This is particularly important in the context of collaborative learning, where students may be located in different places and interact virtually.

However, it is important to consider the limitations and challenges associated with the use of modern technologies in a student-centered approach. Firstly, accessibility and availability of technologies may be uneven, especially for students from less developed regions or social groups. This can create educational inequalities and exclude certain categories of students.

Secondly, effective use of technologies requires qualified educators who can appropriately integrate technologies into the learning process and provide support to students. A shortage of trained teachers may hinder the successful implementation of the student-centered approach.

Additionally, ethical and confidentiality issues related to the use of modern technologies in education should be taken into account. Collection and storage of student data, particularly in the context of using artificial intelligence, must adhere to high standards of security and confidentiality.

Several studies in the field of education and information technology have explored various aspects of technology integration in the educational process. One article examined the role of teachers, the internet, and technology in the education of the younger generation (Szymkowiak et al., 2021 ). Another study investigated students’ perceptions of e-learning platforms (Moodle, Microsoft Teams, and Zoom) in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic (Alameri et al., 2020 ; Gamage et al., 2022 ). Another research focused on bridging the digital divide and acquiring digital skills among elderly individuals (Blažič & Blažič, 2020 ). Influencing factors on the acceptance of mobile learning (m-learning) in higher education were explored in another article (Qashou, 2021 ). A review of digital transformation in education was presented in a study (Bilyalova et al., 2020 ). The use of artificial intelligence in higher education was investigated using structural equation modeling (Chatterjee & Bhattacharjee, 2020 ). Augmented and virtual reality technologies in anatomical education underwent a systematic review (Uruthiralingam & Rea, 2020 ). Overall, these studies reflect different aspects of information technology application in education and highlight the role of teachers, the internet, digital skills, and various technological platforms in student learning.

In Fig.  2 the use of various modern technologies in education is described. Each technology has its own advantages and contributes to the improvement of the learning process. The use of modern technologies in education has a significant impact on the educational process. Interactive e-textbooks offer engaging learning experiences, where students have access to up-to-date information and can instantly assess their knowledge. Web and video conferencing enable students to communicate remotely, participate in discussions, and engage in virtual lectures and seminars. Online learning platforms provide convenient access to educational materials and interactive tools, facilitating self-paced learning and knowledge assessment. Virtual laboratories allow for hands-on practical learning in a safe virtual environment, developing skills in working with technical devices and software. Mobile learning applications offer flexibility and accessibility to educational materials and assignments, allowing students to learn anywhere and anytime. Artificial intelligence and machine learning support personalized learning, automate assignment grading, and offer individual recommendations. Virtual and augmented reality create engaging and immersive educational environments, visualizing complex concepts and enabling practice of practical skills. The use of social networks fosters collaboration and knowledge sharing among students. All these modern technologies greatly enrich the educational process, making it more engaging, effective, and accessible for learners.

Utilization of modern technologies in education

Overall, the use of modern technologies in a student-centered approach opens up significant prospects for enhancing education. However, for successful implementation of this approach, it is necessary to consider limitations and challenges, develop effective implementation strategies, and provide appropriate support and training for the teaching staff. Only then can we fully leverage the potential of modern technologies in education and create more effective and SCL environments.

Research context and data coding

This article presents two methodological approaches to educational research, enriched by a coding scheme, which is a systematic method for analyzing and classifying data obtained from a study. These methodologies allow researchers to effectively analyze and interpret data to better understand various aspects of educational processes. A critical aspect of such analysis is the number of studies conducted within each of the identified methodological approaches. In quantitative studies that use a coding scheme, data are presented in numerical form and are coded according to predetermined parameters or criteria, including coding for level of education (primary, secondary, high school, college, postgraduate), as indicated in several reviews (e.g. Shehata et al., 2023 ; Bremner et al., 2022 ; Khaldi et al., 2023 ). Qualitative research using a coding scheme focuses on the analysis of qualitative data; researchers use a coding scheme to identify key themes, concepts, and categories in the collected data.

After collecting the sources, the content is analyzed and the information from different sources is synthesized to identify common trends and patterns in the chosen field. The literature review method can also include a critical evaluation of the selected sources to determine their credibility, reliability, and relevance.

In this study, the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) (Page et al., 2021 ) methodology for systematic reviews was adopted to ensure a transparent process of developing the search strategy, defining inclusion criteria, and identifying relevant publications. Then, the AMSTAR 2 (Shea, 2017 ) critical appraisal strategy was applied to assess the quality of the publications.

The protocol for a systematic literature review on student-centered approach and modern distance learning technologies, based on the PRISMA methodology and AMSTAR 2 critical appraisal strategy, includes the following steps:

Defining the research question and developing a publication search strategy in databases, considering existing systematic reviews and meta-analyses.

Assessing the quality and relevance of publications based on pre-established inclusion and exclusion criteria.

Extracting data from selected publications and conducting a qualitative synthesis of the obtained results.

Evaluating the quality of the data using the AMSTAR 2 critical appraisal strategy and preparing a corresponding quality assessment report.

The search strategy

In our systematic search strategy, we utilized the most relevant terms and synonyms that encompass the key concepts of this study, which were identified based on previous systematic reviews.

We define scientific data as the obtained factual material, generally accepted in the study of distance learning problems and which, due to its data quality, makes it possible to validate them, as well as reproduce research. For study reproducibility, the full search string can be specified. Example of search and substring strings used (search/substring//substring): “student centered approach”/“student centered approach definition”//“student centered approach meaning”; “modern technologies in distance learning”/“latest technology in online learning”//“emerging technologies in distance education”; “online learning”/“online education”//“online teaching”; “virtual learning”/“virtual learning environment”//“virtual education”; “e-learning”/“e-learning platform”//“e-learning in education”, et al.

We conducted an information search on the Internet not only using a short search summary of the document (bibliography), but also the full text. It should be noted that the distinctive feature of such systems is less formalization of the request, simplicity and clarity of the search engine.

Based on their reputation for comprehensive coverage of literature in the field of student-centered approaches to education and feedback research, we chose Web of Science and Scopus as the most relevant databases for our search queries.

Inclusion criteria

During the initial stage of literature review, we applied three main inclusion and exclusion criteria. We included only studies published in English, as the majority of research publications in this field are written in English. We also included publications published from 2012 to 2023. Finally, to ensure the originality, credibility, and quality of the selected publications, we included only peer-reviewed articles published in scientific journals.

During the second stage of screening, we selected only empirical research studies. Conceptual studies were excluded from our analysis.

Identification of relevant publications

During the screening process, a total of 688 articles were identified from the selected databases (Web of Science—187, Scopus—288, other sources—213). After removing 385 duplicates in the first stage of screening, the number of articles was reduced to 303. Subsequently, in the second stage of screening, we analyzed the titles and abstracts according to our inclusion criteria. Out of these 303 articles, 260 did not meet our criteria and were excluded from further analysis, resulting in a final set of 43 articles. These 43 articles were included in the quality assessment. Figure  3 illustrates the stages of our screening and selection process.

Flowchart of the process of identification and selection of studies in accordance with the PRISMA guidelines

Quality assessment

We used the quality assessment criteria proposed by Shea ( 2017 ) within the framework of AMSTAR 2. These criteria are based on a study conducted to assess the quality of both quantitative and qualitative research. The quality assessment criteria were evaluated at four levels: high, moderate, low, and critically low.

The results of the quality assessment of the 43 systematic reviews conducted using the AMSTAR tool are provided in Additional file 1 : Appendix 1. Among them, 10 were assessed as low quality (AMSTAR score 0–6), 19 as moderate quality (7–11 points), and 10 as high quality (12–16 points). It is worth noting that no conflicts of interest were identified in any of the included studies or the systematic reviews.

The Table  2 presents the main materials and methods used in the student-centered approach to online learning. Each column corresponds to a specific aspect of this approach, and the rows represent various methods and materials used to achieve personalized and engaging learning. The table includes the following categories: “Personalized Content,“ “Interactive Lessons,“ “Flexible Schedule,“ “Collaborative Learning,“ and “Continuous Assessment.“ This table provides a summary and systematic organization of information about the methods that help create a more effective and individually oriented educational environment for students.

These materials and methods contribute to the creation of online learning that is learner-centered, flexible, engaging, and effective. By employing a student-centered approach, online learning can become a valuable tool for students to acquire new skills and knowledge and fully unleash their potential.

The systematic literature review revealed that the student-centered approach and modern technologies play a significant role in distance learning. Numerous studies confirm that the student-centered approach promotes active student engagement in the learning process and enhances their motivation to learn. It also contributes to the development of self-regulated learning and critical thinking skills among students.

Dunbar and Yadav ( 2022 ) analyzed the effects of implementing a summer educational program involving students through service learning on the transition to SCL. The work by Rapanta ( 2021 ) explored the potential of integrating a dialogic argumentation method, oriented towards students, in various subject areas. The report by Grammens et al. ( 2022 ) presents a systematic review of the roles and competencies of teachers in synchronous online learning using video conferencing technologies. Ashiru et al. ( 2022 ) presented a student-centered approach to studying the choice of business education programs at the university level. A study by Muller and Mildenberger ( 2021 ) provides a systematic review of blended learning in higher education, aimed at providing flexible learning by replacing some face-to-face time with online environments. Lastly, Bremner et al. ( 2022 ) research presents a systematic review of the outcomes of student-centered pedagogy. These works contribute to understanding the effectiveness and benefits of SCL in various educational contexts.

In recent years, virtual learning has significantly expanded its use and overtaken e-learning, becoming the second most popular form of learning after online learning. This indicates the growing popularity of virtual learning and its importance in the modern educational context. According to the data in Fig.  4 , e-learning was used in 21%, virtual learning in 37%, and online learning in 42%. This diagram provides information about the distribution of different forms of education and helps understand which forms are the most popular and in demand in the educational environment.

Frequency of use of various forms of education

In recent years, numerous studies have been conducted on the use of virtual educational tools and technologies. For example, Kerimbayev ( 2016 ) research explores the possibilities and implementation of virtual learning, providing insights into its advantages, challenges, and significance in modern education. The study contributes to a better understanding of virtual learning environments and their impact on teaching and learning processes. Radianti et al. ( 2020 ) contribute to understanding virtual educational environments and their application in various areas of learning and education. These studies deepen our understanding of virtual educational environments and their influence on teaching and learning processes in different fields of education.

Aull ( 2020 ) examines student-centered assessment and feedback on written assignments in the online environment. Cavalcanti et al. ( 2021 ) conduct a systematic review of automatic feedback in the online learning environment.

There are also studies addressing artificial intelligence and its application in online education, such as the research conducted by Ouyang et al. ( 2022 ). Other studies in this list examine online entrepreneurship education, the impact of online learning on students with cognitive impairments, as well as the challenges associated with the online component of blended learning and the issues faced by teachers in the online environment (e.g., works by Rasheed et al., 2020 ; Martin et al., 2020 ). The study by Juliantara et al. ( 2022 ) focuses on student-related factors in online learning.

Saleem et al. ( 2022 ) provides a literature review on the application of gamification in e-learning. Giannakos et al. ( 2022 ) conduct a systematic literature review, exploring the potential of e-learning to enhance organizational learning.

The overall trend in these studies indicates the importance of a student-centered approach, the use of various technologies and tools, as well as the development of students’ skills and competencies in online learning. They also emphasize the significance of feedback, collaboration, and flexibility in the online environment.

In general, these studies provide valuable information and recommendations for the development and implementation of student-centered online learning. They also underscore the importance of continuous improvement and the application of new approaches and technologies in this field.

In relation to the use of modern technologies in distance learning, research also highlights the importance of developing information and communication skills among students. It has been shown that the use of technologies can contribute to the development of collaborative learning, online processing, and other forms of active interaction among students. Online learning also enables students to receive feedback and support from their teachers and peers.

The presented diagram is the result of a synthesis of literature analysis, based on the analysis of a number of studies conducted in the field of distance education, taking into account the use of modern technological solutions (Fig.  5 ). This literature review provides a quantitative assessment of academic work on each of the identified technologies and provides valuable insight into the direction and scope of research in the field.

Analysis of the number of studies in the field of modern technologies in distance education

The learner-centered approach to education has been investigated by several researchers, and the results of these studies show that such an approach can take various forms and be individually determined. Furthermore, significant differences in the key findings of these studies have been identified. Kang and Keinonen ( 2018 ) examine the influence of different learner-centered approaches on students’ interest and achievements in the field of science, emphasizing their positive impact on the learning process. Zhang et al. ( 2021 ) explore factors related to the implementation of learner-centered teaching methods, revealing the challenges and difficulties faced by educators. However, overall, the learner-centered approach is considered more effective and appropriate in informal learning settings as it allows students to develop their skills and knowledge, taking into account their individual needs and interests.

The diagram represents various student-centered methodologies related to education and indicates the number of studies conducted in each of these methodologies (Fig.  6 ). The types of methodologies include the development of artificial intelligence in virtual education, assessment and development in student-oriented e-learning environments, literature review studies, student-centered case method in online and offline modes, quantitative research on the impact of SCL, development of learner-centered pedagogy, systematic review of student-centered pedagogy, and the creation of a student-centered online learning environment.

Methodology and amount of research in education

From the presented data, it can be observed that the number of publications indexed in the Scopus and Web of Science databases is unevenly distributed across years (Fig.  7 ). In 2012, Scopus registered more articles than Web of Science. In the subsequent years, the situation changed, and in 2014, Scopus registered significantly more articles than Web of Science. In 2020, the number of publications in both databases was substantial, but Scopus still surpasses Web of Science. Overall, it can be concluded that the number of publications in Scopus and Web of Science is unstable and can vary from year to year.

Publications in Scopus and Web of Science by years (2012–2023)

However, the systematic literature review also identified some challenges and limitations associated with the implementation of student-centered approaches and modern technologies in distance learning. Some studies highlight the need for more effective training of teachers in technology use and the application of student-centered approaches. It is also noted that individual needs and differences of students should be taken into account when designing and implementing educational programs.

Overall, the systematic literature review confirms the significance of student-centered approaches and modern technologies in distance learning. It emphasizes their positive impact on student engagement, the development of self-regulation and critical thinking skills, as well as the creation of conditions for more flexible and personalized education. However, for the effective implementation of these approaches and technologies, further work is required in terms of teacher training, program adaptation, and providing support to students in the online learning environment.

Thus, the findings of the systematic literature review confirm that student-centered approaches and modern technologies play an important role in distance learning. They contribute to active student participation, educational individualization, and the development of necessary skills. However, further work is needed for the effective implementation of these approaches and technologies in educational practice.

The results of the study confirmed that there is considerable experience in the field of distance learning in applying a student-centered approach. Modern technologies such as interactive platforms, adaptive learning systems and virtual reality are closely related to this approach. The advantages of introducing a student-centered approach and modern technologies are the individualization of learning, improved interaction and accessibility of education. However, limitations include the need for access to technology and the difficulty of adapting traditional models to a remote format. For effective implementation, it is recommended to ensure the availability of technology, integrate a student-centered approach, organize interaction and support for students, and conduct ongoing research on the effectiveness of implementation.

This section discusses the relationship between the student-centered approach and the use of modern technologies in distance learning based on the conducted systematic literature review. It assesses the advantages and challenges associated with implementing such an approach in the context of distance learning and discusses the prospects for its development and recommendations for practice.

In this study, various works related to the topic of student-centered approaches and modern technologies in distance learning were examined. The study by Wang and Zhang ( 2019 ) explores the relationship between the student-centered approach, deep learning, and self-assessment of skill improvement among higher education students in China. The work by Xie et al. ( 2020 ) and Yin et al. ( 2021 ) examines motivation, engagement, and academic achievement of students in the context of an inquiry-based approach. Chen and Tsai ( 2021 ) delve into the utilization of mobile technologies in education and teachers’ perceptions of this approach. Brouwer et al. ( 2019 ) explore interaction and a sense of belonging within learning environments that prioritize learners. Cheng and Ding ( 2021 ) make a comparison between the behavior and motivation of Chinese teachers and students in this educational context. Al-Balushi et al. ( 2020 ) examine teachers’ and their supervisors’ perceptions of student-centered classrooms and the learning process. Overall, these works enrich our understanding of the impact of the student-centered approach and the use of modern technologies in distance learning on student motivation, interaction, and achievement.

In addition to the previous works, the following studies related to the topic of student-centered approaches in education have also been explored. Polly et al. ( 2015 ) examine the relationship between teacher professional development, their outcomes, and student achievement using a mathematics program for elementary school teachers as an example. Marioara ( 2015 ) discusses the changes in education associated with the implementation of a student-centered approach. The work by Rich ( 2021 ) investigates teacher agency when using mathematical instructional programs and their impact on SCL. Haber-Curran and Tillapaugh ( 2015 ) examine transformative learning with an emphasis on a student-centered approach in leadership education. Frambach et al. ( 2014 ) study student behavior in discussions in student-centered education across different cultures. Baeten et al. ( 2013 ) explore student-centered teaching methods and their impact on students’ approaches to learning in higher professional education. Adam et al. ( 2017 ) conduct a systematic review of self-regulated learning and online learning. Aytaç and Kula ( 2020 ) perform a meta-analysis of studies on the impact of student-centered approaches on the development of students’ creative thinking. Finally, Metsälä and Törnroos ( 2021 ) conduct a literature review on the benefits and effectiveness of student-centered strategies in healthcare education. These works provide additional scientific evidence for the significance of the student-centered approach in modern education and its impact on student learning and development.

Baeten et al. ( 2010 ) examine the use of SCL environments to stimulate deep approaches to learning. Bower and Hedberg ( 2010 ) conduct a quantitative multimodal analysis of teaching and learning discourse in a web-conferencing environment and assess the effectiveness of student-centered learning-based designs. Hew and Cheung ( 2014 ) investigate the motivation and issues faced by students and instructors in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). Rabin et al. ( 2019 ) conduct an empirical study on the antecedents of achievement of student-centered outcomes in MOOCs. Cela et al. ( 2015 ) explore social network analytics in e-learning. Chen et al. ( 2021 ) conduct a systematic review of technology adoption in online and blended entrepreneurial education. Cinquin et al. ( 2019 ) investigate online learning and cognitive impairments. Garcia et al. ( 2018 ) conduct a systematic review of self-regulated learning using electronic tools in computer science education. Wong et al. ( 2015 ) describe a model for integrating learning management systems, MOOCs, and flipped classrooms in an integrated Moodle learning system. Harris et al. ( 2013 ) provide a literature review confirming the significant impact of student-centered schools on learning. Hernández-Velázquez et al. ( 2021 ) conduct a systematic review of literature on the relationship between mobile learning and student-centered design. Margot and Kettler ( 2019 ) review teachers’ perceptions of integration and education in STEM fields. Marín ( 2022 ) critically analyzes SCL in higher education during the COVID-19 pandemic. Mousavinasab et al. ( 2021 ) conduct a systematic review of intelligent learning systems, their characteristics, applications, and assessment methods. O’Donnell et al. ( 2017 ) present a systematic review of personalized approaches to studying traumatic events. Rukmini et al. ( 2018 ) conduct a meta-analysis and systematic literature review on student-centered learning and its relationship with academic achievement and soft skills. Shah and Kumar ( 2020 ) present concepts of student-centered learning.

Student-centered teaching strategies are approaches to education that emphasize the needs and interests of students rather than the requirements of the curriculum or the teacher. These strategies take into account individual differences among students, their cultural and social context, and different learning styles. They help students develop critical thinking, self-esteem, and self-regulation (Andersen & Andersen 2017 ). However, research shows that student-centered teaching strategies may have a negative impact on the academic performance of students from different socioeconomic backgrounds. Therefore, for the effective implementation of student-centered teaching strategies, it is necessary to consider the context of their application and provide the necessary support and resources to students so that they can successfully meet their educational needs and goals.

The advantages of a student-centered approach and the use of modern technologies in distance learning include:

Student motivation: The student-centered approach and modern technologies allow creating interactive and attractive educational environments that stimulate the interest and motivation of students. This promotes active student participation in the learning process.

Individualized learning: Through the use of modern technologies and a student-centered approach, educators can adapt educational materials and methodologies to meet the individual needs and proficiency levels of each student. This allows us to provide personalized support and ensure optimal conditions for the learning and development of each student.

Flexibility in learning: Distance learning with the use of modern technologies allows students to study at their own time and location, providing flexibility in organizing the learning process. This is particularly important for students who have other commitments, such as work or family.

Development of digital literacy skills: The use of modern technologies in distance learning contributes to the development of digital literacy skills among students. They gain experience working with various digital tools and resources, which is crucial for their future professional endeavors.

Feedback and assessment: Modern technologies enable teachers to provide more frequent and precise feedback to students. Automated assessment systems can also be employed, allowing for more objective evaluation of students’ knowledge and skills.

The advantages of a student-centered approach and modern technologies in distance learning contribute to more effective and personalized education, meeting students’ needs, and improving learning outcomes. Students engaged in a student-centered educational environment using modern technologies can develop skills in independent work, critical thinking, collaboration, and communication. This helps them better grasp the learning material and apply it in practical contexts.

Due to the individualization of learning and flexibility in organizing the learning process, students can develop their strengths, overcome challenging moments, and achieve better results. Educational materials and assignments can be adapted to their needs and interests, promoting deeper understanding and retention of the material.

Moreover, a student-centered approach and modern technologies allow teachers to gain a more accurate understanding of each student’s progress and respond to their needs and difficulties in real-time. This contributes to more effective student support and enhances the quality of education.

Overall, the advantages of a student-centered approach and modern technologies in distance learning include increased motivation, personalized learning, flexibility, development of digital literacy skills, and improved feedback and assessment. These advantages contribute to higher-quality education and better achievement of students’ learning goals.

Restrictions

During the process of reviewing and addressing research questions, this study identified several limitations. The vast amount of published articles can lead to the omission of some relevant works, which is a common challenge in literature reviews. Significant effort is required when constructing search queries and determining keywords to ensure the success of the search process. The method of identifying keywords in this study relied on the “snowballing” process to uncover related reflections and keywords associated with the research topic. However, the limited timeframe may have resulted in the exclusion of certain articles or combinations of keywords, potentially leading to the omission of relevant information.

Furthermore, it should be noted that this study has its own limitations related to the selected criteria for inclusion. For example, it focused only on the analysis of journal articles in the English language. Consequently, works written in other languages or unpublished in journals may have been excluded from consideration.

Overall, despite the aforementioned limitations, this study provides important findings in the examined research area. To achieve a more comprehensive understanding of the topic and account for the limitations, it is recommended to consider these factors when planning and conducting future research.

Recommendation for further research

Our research has revealed the absence of a widely accepted conceptual framework for the components to consider when developing a student-centered approach and using modern technologies in distance learning. In the future, research could focus on exploring the components involved in various student-centered approach systems and modern distance learning technologies, and establishing common principles and terminology to create a unified approach and definition. It is important to note that this concept will evolve as our understanding of human psychology and the development of new technologies expand. Al-Ansi’s ( 2022 ) study examines the strengthening of student-centered learning through social e-learning and assessment. Rotar’s ( 2022 ) work proposes a framework for implementing student support in the online learning cycle. These studies contribute significantly to understanding the effectiveness and applicability of these approaches and technologies in distance learning, offering new ideas and recommendations for future research.

Additionally, the emphasis on developing higher-order thinking skills has not received sufficient attention in the existing literature. To address this gap, attention can be given to the development of higher-order thinking skills in the context of a student-centered learning environment. Future research can also focus on implementing these skills using a student-centered approach and modern technologies, including the potential application of virtual reality, while considering ethical and confidentiality issues.

Furthermore, conducting a detailed investigation to analyze existing platforms and systems of student-centered approaches and modern technologies in distance learning is necessary to determine which systems work best for different purposes and needs. This will help identify best practices and select the most effective learning systems.

This systematic literature review examined the impact of a student-centered approach and modern technologies on distance learning. The analysis of the presented studies allows for the following conclusions.

Firstly, a student-centered approach plays a crucial role in the effectiveness of distance learning. Considering students’ needs and preferences, as well as actively involving them in the learning process, contributes to increased motivation and better outcomes. The use of personalized approaches, adaptive technologies and tools, as well as feedback, helps create a learning environment tailored to each student’s individual needs.

Secondly, modern technologies play an important role in the development of distance learning. They provide access to educational resources, create interactive and collaborative environments, and enable the use of gamification and virtual reality in education. Tools such as electronic platforms, online communication, cloud technologies, and data analytics facilitate the effective delivery of materials, interaction between students and instructors, and adaptation of the educational process to changing needs.

Lastly, the student-centered approach and modern technologies in distance learning are interconnected and mutually reinforcing. The combination of these approaches allows for the creation of effective and innovative learning environments that promote active and interactive student engagement. They provide flexibility, accessibility, and personalization of learning, which are particularly relevant in the context of distance learning.

Overall, the systematic literature review allows for the conclusion that a student-centered approach and modern technologies play a significant role in enhancing the quality of distance learning. They contribute to active student engagement, personalization of the educational process, and the creation of an interactive learning environment. However, successful implementation of this approach requires consideration of the diversity of student needs and overcoming associated limitations. Therefore, further research and development in this field will contribute to the continued advancement of distance learning and the provision of quality education for students.

The student-centered approach includes the active involvement of students in the educational process, taking into account their needs and preferences, as well as the development of self-regulation and autonomy skills. It focuses on individualizing learning and supporting students in their educational journey. Modern technologies, in turn, provide a wide range of tools and resources for creating interactive and adaptive educational environments, ensuring accessibility and convenience in learning.

The use of modern technologies such as electronic platforms, virtual classrooms, multimedia materials, and communication tools enables the creation of an effective and flexible educational environment. They enrich learning by making it more interactive and engaging for students. They also facilitate personalized learning, allowing students to choose their own time and pace of learning.

However, for the full implementation of the student-centered approach and effective use of modern technologies in distance learning, it is necessary to consider limitations and challenges. This includes ensuring technology accessibility for all students, the quality of educational content, support and training for instructors in technology use, as well as organizational and managerial aspects.

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The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

Acknowledgements

The study was carried out within the framework of the project number AP19676457 by the Science Committee of the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Republic of Kazakhstan.

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Kerimbayev, N., Umirzakova, Z., Shadiev, R. et al. A student-centered approach using modern technologies in distance learning: a systematic review of the literature. Smart Learn. Environ. 10 , 61 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40561-023-00280-8

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Shifting to Student-Centered Learning: The Role of Curriculum & Instruction

Authored by:

In many of today’s classrooms that have adopted a “teaching to the test” mentality, students have become passive participants in their own learning, unable to make the connections between the lessons they’re taught and how they apply in the real world. School is something to be endured rather than enjoyed. But a new — or recurring — pedagogical approach is springing up through classrooms. Enter student-centered learning.  

What is student-centered learning?

Student-centered learning puts students at the center of their learning experiences by engaging them in decisions about what they learn and how they learn it. It invites students to co-create their educational experience by activating their interests and hobbies as pathways to learning. Allowing them to select the way they interact with a subject matter helps them connect abstract concepts and skills to real-world applications, giving them valuable experience in navigating the classroom and the world around them. 

There are three popular applications of student-centered instruction: 

Project-based learning : This format allows students to learn by doing. By taking a hands-on approach, students develop deep content knowledge as well as critical thinking skills. 

Inquiry-based learning : This method invites students to answer a question they might have, activating their curiosity and encouraging them to explore where it takes them in the process of uncovering an answer. 

Collaborative learning : While this approach might be thought of as group work, it is designed to engage students in deep discussions, peer coaching, and individual and group reflection. The idea behind it is that learning is a shared product between at least two people and puts students in the act of being both teacher and learner. 

In all three scenarios, learning is an active process rather than a passive process. No longer can a student check out because they are now responsible for their own education. This shift in educational models means anticipating and planning for it in a way that meets the needs of each student while also maintaining the academic standards required by the state. That’s where curriculum and instruction comes into play.  

What is curriculum and instruction?

In a nutshell, it is the study and teaching of learning experiences. Curriculum refers to the information and skills that students are taught, while instruction refers to the teaching strategies and methods used to convey that information. For example, if the curriculum is centered around science, the instruction is how you teach someone to do and understand science.  

How does curriculum and instruction support student-centered learning?

School curriculum plays a central role when it comes to student-centered learning. Curriculums are designed to create a structured and consistent standard of learning and assessment, based on extensive educational research, input from state and local education authorities, and the type of school. But rather than following a predetermined script, classrooms that adopt a student-centered learning approach use their curriculum as a way to activate student interest. The curriculum becomes a jumping-off point, allowing students to bring their own experiences, needs, and prior knowledge to the classroom. 

The teacher is now responsible for directing students to source their answers in addition to being a source of content knowledge. Explains Dr. Curtis Pyke , associate professor of curriculum and pedagogy at the George Washington (GW) Graduate School of Education and Human Development, “We see the shift from the teacher being the center of instruction and the authority of what’s right and wrong, what’s taught and not taught, toward the student and their ideas being the focus of instruction and developing the learner.” This has the byproduct of creating instructional approaches that are fair, equitable, and inclusive.  

How can teachers and administrators make this shift?

The first step is accepting the shift from lecturer to facilitator. Central to this shift is being willing to acknowledge when you don’t have all the answers and inviting students to accompany you on the learning journey. That may mean identifying other teachers or outside partners who can support students on their quest to find answers. It also means being open to new trends in teaching, learning, and student assessment. 

With student-centered learning comes the need for creative thinkers who can design and evaluate curriculum, instruction, and assessments that support this pedagogical approach. Not to mention, designers help create meaningful educational experiences that support students of all abilities.

Teachers and administrators often make the best curriculum and instruction designers because of their firsthand knowledge of what works in a classroom and what doesn’t. For those who are looking for a way to apply that knowledge in a new way outside of the classroom, you may want to consider a career evolution from teaching to curriculum and instructional design. 

Graduate programs in curriculum and pedagogy focus on shaping the future of learning through researching the practice of teaching to drive change. In addition to thinking about the classroom component, they also consider ethical, social, and political issues in the context of education to create equitable educational experiences. Designers go on to work in a variety of settings, including academic institutions, research organizations, foundations, government agencies, and more.

Shares Dr. Pyke, “There is much to learn, always. What we teach and how we teach are constantly evolving as we respond to changes in our world. We need researchers, scholars, and practitioners to guide us.” Learn more about the graduate degrees and certificates available in curriculum and instruction at GW >

Exploring the impact of the adaptive gamified assessment on learners in blended learning

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• Published: 06 May 2024

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• Zhihui Zhang   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-0277-4937 1 &
• Xiaomeng Huang   ORCID: orcid.org/0009-0008-6864-5821 2  

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Blended learning combines online and traditional classroom instruction, aiming to optimize educational outcomes. Despite its potential, student engagement with online components remains a significant challenge. Gamification has emerged as a popular solution to bolster engagement, though its effectiveness is contested, with research yielding mixed results. This study addresses this gap by examining the impact of adaptive gamified assessments on young learners' motivation and language proficiency within a blended learning framework. Under Self-Determination Theory (SDT) and Language Assessment Principles, the study evaluates how adaptive gamified tests affect learner engagement and outcomes. A 20-week comparative experiment involved 45 elementary school participants in a blended learning environment. The experimental group ( n  = 23) took the adaptive gamified test, while the control group ( n  = 22) engaged with non-gamified e-tests. Statistical analysis using a paired t-test in SPSS revealed that the implementation of adaptive gamified testing in the blended learning setting significantly decreased learner dissatisfaction (t (44) = 10.13, p  < .001, SD = 0.87). Moreover, this approach markedly improved learners' accuracy rates (t (44) = -25.75, p  < .001, SD = 2.09), indicating enhanced language proficiency and motivation, as also reflected in the attitude scores (t(44) = -14.47, p  < .001, SD = 4.73). The adaptive gamified assessment primarily enhanced intrinsic motivation related to competence, with 69% of students in the experimental group reporting increased abilities. The findings suggest that adaptive gamified testing is an effective instructional method for fostering improved motivation and learning outcomes.

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1 Introduction

In the rapidly evolving landscape of educational technology, blended learning (BL) has become a prominent approach, seamlessly integrating face-to-face and online learning experiences (Hill & Smith, 2023 ; Rasheed et al., 2020 ). While previous research has emphasized the widespread adoption and benefits of BL, including improved academic achievement (Boelens et al., 2017 ; Hill & Smith, 2023 ), challenges faced by students, teachers, and educational institutions in its implementation are also recognized (Rasheed et al., 2020 ). Designing effective blended learning (BL) presents several key challenges, including diminished learner attention and a decline in motivation, which result in decreased engagement and participation in courses (Khaldi et al., 2023 ). Furthermore, students may face difficulties with preparatory tasks and quizzes prior to in-person classes, often due to inadequate motivation (Albiladi & Alshareef, 2019 ; Boelens et al., 2017 ).

Gamification, defined as the educational use of game mechanics and design principles extending beyond traditional games (Schell, 2008 ), has garnered attention. Studies highlight its positive impact on learning motivation, emphasizing the mediating role of psychological needs under the self-determination theory (Deci & Ryan, 2016 ). This positions gamification as a potential solution for addressing challenges in blended learning. Recent systematic research underscores the significance of leveraging gamification in online environments to enhance student engagement (Bizami et al., 2023 ; Jayawardena et al., 2021 ).

The increasing popularity of gamified tests has positively influenced academia, supporting blended learning models and formal education settings (Bolat & Taş, 2023 ; Saleem et al., 2022 ). Recent findings suggest that gamified assessments contribute to higher process satisfaction among students compared to traditional assessments (Cortés-Pérez et al., 2023 ; Sanchez et al., 2020 ). The advent of machine learning algorithms has given rise to adaptive gamified assessments, offering a novel approach to personalized testing and feedback, thereby enhancing learning autonomy (Llorens-Largo et al., n.d. ). Therefore, this study focuses on investigating the impact of gamified assessment on blended learning.

While existing research has explored the impact of gamification in online environments (Can & Dursun, 2019 ; Ramírez-Donoso et al., 2023 ), a noticeable gap remains in understanding the specific effects of gamified tests in online settings, particularly within the context of K-12 education. Research on adaptive gamified assessments is limited, emphasizing the need for further exploration (Bennani et al., 2022 ). Consequently, this study primarily focuses on investigating adaptive gamified assessments, with research objectives centered around motivation and knowledge levels in early education. The research objectives are outlined as follows:

Does adaptive gamified assessment enhance learners' motivation on blended learning? What is the effect of the adaptive gamified assessment on learners' motivation?

Does adaptive gamified assessment improve learners’ academic performance on blended learning?

To address the challenges present in blended learning, this research contributes to the field by providing insights into the effects of machine learning-based gamified assessments on motivation and performance, offering valuable recommendations for the improvement of blended learning. The findings could also facilitate the design and adoption of blended learning, particularly in the context of K-12 education.

The subsequent sections will delve into a comprehensive literature review, conceptual framework, outline the chosen methodology, present results, and discussions, and conclude with implications and avenues for future research.

2 Literature review

2.1 blended learning challenges and benefits.

Blended learning has emerged as a popular educational model, distinct from traditional instructional methods. It represents a convergence of in-person and online learning, leveraging the strengths of each to enhance the educational experience (Poon, 2013 ). The hybrid approach combines classroom effectiveness and socialization with the technological benefits of online modules, offering a compelling alternative to conventional teaching models. It has identified significant improvements in academic performance attributable to blended learning's efficiency, flexibility, and capacity (Hill & Smith, 2023 ). The approach also facilitates increased interaction between staff and students, promotes active engagement, and provides opportunities for continuous improvement (Can & Dursun, 2019 ).

Despite these advantages, blended learning is not without its challenges, particularly for students, teachers, and educational institutions during implementation. Boelens et al. ( 2017 ) highlight that students often face self-regulation challenges, including poor time management and procrastination. The degree of autonomy in blended courses requires heightened self-discipline, especially online, to mitigate learner isolation and the asynchronous nature of digital interactions (Hill & Smith, 2023 ). Isolation can be a critical issue, as students engaged in pre-class activities such as reading and assignments often do so in solitude, which can lead to a decrease in motivation and an increase in feelings of alienation (Chuang et al., 2018 ; Yang & Ogata, 2023 ).

Teachers, on the other hand, encounter obstacles in technological literacy and competency. Personalizing learning content, providing feedback, and assessing each student can demand considerable time and effort (Cuesta Medina, 2018 ; Bower et al., 2015 ). These challenges can adversely affect teachers' perceptions and attitudes towards technology (Albiladi & Alshareef, 2019 ). Furthermore, from a systems perspective, implementing Learning Management Systems (LMSs) that accommodate diverse learning styles is a significant hurdle. It necessitates a custom approach to effectively support differentiated learning trajectories (Albiladi & Alshareef, 2019 ; Boelens et al., 2017 ; Brown, 2016 ). Current research efforts are thus focused on enhancing the effectiveness of blended learning and its facilitation of independent learning practices.

2.2 Gamification in education

Gamification in education signifies the integration of game design elements into teaching activities that are not inherently game-related. This approach is distinct from game-based learning, where the primary focus is on engaging learners in gameplay to acquire knowledge. Gamification introduces game dynamics into non-gaming environments to enrich the learning experience (Alsawaier, 2018 ).

With the progression of technology, gamification has become increasingly prevalent within educational frameworks, aiming to amplify student engagement, motivation, and interactivity (Oliveira et al., 2023 ). Empirical evidence supports that gamification can effectively address issues such as the lack of motivation and frustration in educational contexts (Alt, 2023 ; Buckley & Doyle, 2016 ). Components like levels and leaderboards have been successful as external motivators, promoting a competitive spirit among learners (Mekler et al., 2017 ). Furthermore, research indicates that gamification can have enduring effects on student participation, fostering beneficial learning behaviors (Alsawaier, 2018 ).

Despite these positive aspects, some scholarly inquiries have presented a more nuanced view, suggesting that gamification does not unilaterally enhance academic outcomes. These varying results invite deeper investigation into the conditions under which gamification can truly enhance the educational experience (Oliveira et al., 2023 ). In light of such findings, recent gamified designs have increasingly emphasized personalization, taking into account the unique characteristics, needs, and preferences of each student. Studies have explored the tailoring of gamification frameworks to align with diverse student profiles (Dehghanzadeh et al., 2023 ; Ghaban & Hendley, 2019 ), learning styles (Hassan et al., 2021 ), pedagogical approaches, and knowledge structures (Oliveira et al., 2023 ). However, the literature still presents contradictory findings, and there is a relative dearth of research focusing on learning outcomes (Oliveira et al., 2023 ).

2.3 Adaptive assessment in education

Adaptive learning harnesses technological advancements to create a supportive educational environment where instructional content is tailored to individual learning processes (Muñoz et al., 2022 ). This pedagogical approach is grounded in the principle of differentiated instruction, allowing for the personalization of educational resources to meet diverse learning requirements (Reiser & Tabak, 2014 ).

Adaptive assessments, stemming from the philosophy of adaptive learning, dynamically adjust the difficulty of questions based on a learner's previous answers, terminating the assessment once enough data is collected to form a judgment (Barney & Fisher Jr, 2016 ). In the digital age, with the proliferation of e-learning, there has been a significant shift towards adaptive computer-based assessments (Muñoz et al., 2022 ), utilizing AI-based modeling techniques (Coşkun, 2023 ), and emotion-based adaptation in e-learning environments (Boughida et al., 2024 ). These assessments are characterized by their ability to modify testing parameters in response to student performance, employing machine learning algorithms to ascertain a student’s proficiency level.

Prior studies on adaptive methods have revealed several advantages, such as delivering personalized feedback promptly, forecasting academic achievement, and facilitating interactive learning support. These advantages extend to potentially enhancing learner engagement and outcomes (Muñoz et al., 2022 ). However, adapting instruction to cater to varied skill levels remains a challenge, as does addressing the issues of demotivation and anxiety among students undergoing assessment (Akhtar et al., 2023 ). Consequently, current research is concentrated on boosting student motivation and engagement in adaptive assessments.

In the field of gamified education, adaptive gamification aims to merge adaptive learning principles with game elements to enrich the learning experience. This approach has been explored through the use of data mining techniques on student logs to foster motivation within adaptive gamified web-based environments (Hassan et al., 2021 ). Despite these innovative efforts, empirical research on gamified adaptive assessment is limited, as the field is still developing.

2.4 Integration of blended learning and gamified assessment

The combination of blended learning with gamified assessment has been recognized for its potential to increase student engagement, a critical factor often lacking in online learning compared to traditional classroom settings (Dumford & Miller, 2018 ; Hill & Smith, 2023 ). Studies investigating the role of gamification within online learning environments have found that it can enhance students’ achievement by fostering greater interaction with content (Taşkın & Kılıç Çakmak, 2023 ). Moreover, gamified activities that demand active participation can promote active engagement (Özhan & Kocadere, 2020 ).

Investigations into the efficacy of Gamified Assessment in online environments suggest that students may reap the benefits of its motivational potential. For instance, research has adapted motivational formative assessment tools from massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) for use in cMOOCs, demonstrating positive outcomes (Danka, 2020 ). Another study compared the effects of traditional online assessment environments to those employing gamified elements, such as point systems, observing the impact on student task completion and quality in mathematics assessments (Attali & Arieli-Attali, 2015 ). Collectively, these studies indicate that gamified tests can indirectly benefit learning by enhancing the instructional content.

While many studies affirm the efficacy of gamified tests as a valuable, cost-effective tool for educators in blended learning environments (Sanchez et al., 2020 ), there is a noted gap in research addressing individual differences within gamified testing. Particularly, empirical research on adaptive gamified assessment is scarce, with more focus on the computational aspects of system development than on the impacts on motivation and academic achievement. Furthermore, while studies suggest that gamified tests may enhance the 'testing effect'—the phenomenon where testing an individual's memory improves long-term retention—most of this research is centered in higher education (Pitoyo & Asib, 2020 ).

The use of gamification spans various educational levels, from primary and secondary schooling to university and lifelong learning programs. However, research focusing on the implementation of gamification in primary and secondary education tends to prioritize the perspective of educators and the application within instructional activities (Yang & Ogata, 2023 ), rather than the online assessment itself. Therefore, this study aims to advance the empirical understanding of the application of gamification in assessments and its potential to improve learning outcomes, particularly in early education.

3 Theoretical framework

3.1 self-determination theory (sdt).

Self-Determination Theory (SDT) is a well-known theory of motivation that offers an in-depth understanding of human needs, motivation, and well-being within social and cultural environments (Chiu, 2021 ). Gamification, which applies gaming elements in non-game settings, frequently employs SDT to address educational challenges in both gamified and online learning platforms (Chapman et al., 2023 ). SDT distinguishes itself by its focus on autonomous versus controlled forms of motivation and the impact of intrinsic and extrinsic motivators, as characterized by Ryan and Deci ( 2000 ). Unlike intrinsic motivation, which is driven by internal desires, extrinsic motivation relies on external incentives such as rewards, points, or deadlines to elicit behaviors—commonly seen in the reward structures of gamified learning environments. In these adaptive gamified assessments, the provision of points and rewards for task completion serves to regulate extrinsic motivation, offering various rewards and titles each time a student completes an exercise task.

SDT is a comprehensive theory that explores the intricacies of human motivation. A subset of SDT, Cognitive Evaluation Theory, postulates that three innate psychological needs—autonomy, competence, and relatedness—propel individuals to act (Deci & Ryan, 2012 ). Autonomy is experienced when individuals feel they have control over their learning journey, making choices that align with their self-identity, such as selecting specific content areas or types of questions in an adaptive gamified assessment. Competence emerges when individuals encounter optimal challenges that match their skills, where adaptive gamified assessments can adjust in difficulty and provide feedback, thereby promoting skill acquisition and mastery. Relatedness is the sense of connection with others, fostered by supportive and engaging learning environments. In gamified contexts, this can be achieved through competitive elements and parental involvement in the learning process, enhancing the learning atmosphere.

The fulfillment of these psychological needs, particularly those of autonomy and competence, is central to fostering intrinsic motivation according to SDT. Figure  1 examines the adaptive gamified assessment process and how it aligns with SDT.

The structure of the adaptive gamified assessment

3.2 Principles of language assessment

The adaptive gamified assessment in this study utilizes Quizizz, an online educational technology platform that offers formative gamified tests to help students develop academic skills in various subjects, including English language (Göksün & Gürsoy, 2019 ). Drawing on the five principles of language assessment as outlined by Brown and Abeywickrama ( 2004 ), this study analyzes the adaptive gamified assessment. These principles—authenticity, practicality, reliability, validity, and washback—are foundational in foreign language teaching and assessment.

Practicality refers to the flexibility of the test to operate without constraints of time, resources, and technical requirements. Quizizz’s adaptive assessments are seamlessly integrated into blended learning environments, designed for time efficiency, and require minimal resources, making them suitable for a broad range of educational contexts. The platform's user-friendly design ensures that assessments are easily administered and completed by students, necessitating only an internet connection and a digital device (Göksün & Gürsoy, 2019 ).

Reliability is the extent to which an assessment consistently yields stable results over time and across different learner groups, providing dependable measures of language proficiency. Quizizz's algorithms adapt task difficulty based on learner responses, offering consistent outcomes and measuring student performance reliably over time (Munawir & Hasbi, 2021 ).

Validity concerns the assessment's ability to accurately measure language abilities in alignment with intended learning outcomes and real-world language application. Quizizz's assessments measure language skills that correlate directly with curriculum-defined learning outcomes, ensuring that results are valid representations of a student's language capabilities. The gamified context also mirrors competitive real-life scenarios, enhancing the authenticity of language use (Priyanti et al., 2019 ).

Authenticity indicates that assessments should mirror real-life language usage, providing tasks that are meaningful and indicative of actual communication situations. Quizizz's assessments incorporate tasks resembling real-world communicative scenarios, such as reading passages, interactive dialogues, and written responses that reflect authentic language use (Brown & Abeywickrama, 2004 ).

Washback refers to the influence of assessments on teaching and learning practices, which should be constructive and foster language learning. Quizizz's immediate feedback from adaptive assessments can positively affect teaching and learning. Instructors can utilize the results to pinpoint student strengths and areas for improvement, customizing their teaching strategies accordingly. Students benefit from being challenged at the appropriate level, bolstering motivation and facilitating the acquisition of new language skills in a gradual, supportive manner (Munawir & Hasbi, 2021 ).

Previous research has demonstrated that Quizizz has a significant impact on academic performance across various educational institutions (Munawir & Hasbi, 2021 ). As an exemplar of gamified adaptive assessment, Quizizz is designed to be practical and reliable while offering valid and authentic assessments of language proficiency. Moreover, it strives for a positive washback effect on the learning process, promoting effective language learning strategies and accommodating personalized education.

4 Methodology

4.1 research design.

This study employed a controlled experimental design within a quantitative research framework. The methodology involved several stages, as illustrated in Fig.  2 . Firstly, participants were selected based on their responses to a pre-questionnaire and a pre-assessment, ensuring comparable baseline levels in English proficiency and computer literacy among all participants. Subsequently, participants were randomly assigned to either the control or the experimental group to ensure variability and minimize bias. Over a period of 20 weeks, a blended language learning intervention was administered to both groups. This intervention involved accessing identical online learning resources before and after traditional classroom sessions, with equal amounts of offline instruction time. Daily assessments were conducted throughout the intervention period. The experimental group completed gamified adaptive tests via Quizizz, while the control group undertook non-gamified adaptive tests on a computer. Upon completion of the intervention, surveys were conducted to assess the motivation levels of both groups and compare their English language proficiency. Data were collected from both pre- and post-assessments, as well as responses from the questionnaires and structured interviews.

Flowchart of the experimental process for assessing the impact of gamified learning on student outcomes

4.2 Participants

Forty-five English learners from primary schools in China, aged 8 to 10 years (M = 9.40, SD = 0.62), participated in this study. The sample comprised 25 girls (55.56%) and 20 boys (44.44%). Insights into students' previous experiences, motivations for formative assessments, and attitudes toward language learning were gathered through a pre-questionnaire. Informed consent was obtained from all participants and their guardians, and confidentiality and anonymity were maintained throughout the study. Participants see in Fig.  3 were randomly divided into a control group (n = 22; 12 girls and 10 boys) and an experimental group (n = 23; 13 girls and 10 boys). The experimental group received instructions on completing and utilizing the adaptive gamified assessment, Quizizz, while the control group completed non-gamified adaptive tests on a computer. Both groups adopted the same blended learning model and were informed of identical deadlines for weekly formative assessments, requiring an accuracy rate of over 90%. Immediate feedback was provided on the accuracy rates, and participants were informed they could attempt the assessment again if the target was not met.

Comparison of number and gender ratio in two groups

4.3 Instruments

The study utilized Quizizz's Adaptive Question Bank mode, offering a range of question difficulties and allowing students to progress at their own pace. The questionnaire was adapted from the Student Evaluation of Educational Quality (SEEQ), which has demonstrated a high level of reliability, with Cronbach's alpha ranging from 0.88 to 0.97. Additionally, according to Pecheux and Derbaix ( 1999 ), the questionnaire was designed to be as concise as possible for young learners and was administered in their native language, Chinese.

The content of the questionnaire includes a 5-point Likert scale used to measure students' attitudes toward adaptive gamified tests. The response options are as follows: strongly agree = 9, agree = 7, neutral = 5, disagree = 3, and strongly disagree = 1. The statements cover various aspects of gamified testing, including Engagement and Enjoyment, exemplified by 'You enjoy learning new words through game tests. Game tests make learning grammar and vocabulary more fun for you.' Anxiety and Confidence, as indicated by 'Game tests help you feel less worried about making mistakes in learning.' Understanding and Retention, highlighted by 'Playing educational games helps you understand your lessons better.' And preference over traditional testing methods, as shown by 'You prefer taking quizzes when they are like games compared to regular tests.' This total score will provide a cumulative measure of their attitude toward gamified language tests. In addition, there are questions asking participants to express their overall satisfaction with the blended learning experience as a percentage. This metric is instrumental in assessing the role of gamified testing within the blended learning framework. Furthermore, there are specific aspects of gamification: binary yes/no questions that delve into specific components and potential effects of gamified tests, such as the impact of leaderboards and rewards on motivation, and willingness to spend extra time on gamified tests.

Moreover, to explore the impact of adaptive gamified assessment on motivation, structured interviews were conducted with the experimental group. The questions, adapted from Chiu ( 2021 ), primarily focused on aspects of motivation such as amotivation, external regulation, intrinsic motivation, and the psychological needs related to relatedness, autonomy, and competency, as seen in Table  1 . Responses were quantified on the same Likert scale, with options ranging from 'strongly agree' to 'strongly disagree.'

5 Results and discussion

5.1 comparison language learning attitude scores and satisfaction of participants.

To analyze the impact of adaptive gamified assessments on learners, the trajectory of language learning attitude scores and satisfaction percentage for two groups over the course of the experiment was explored, with results depicted in Fig. 4 and Fig. 5.

In Fig.  4 , the total score of language learning attitude for the control group's online assessment and the experimental group's adaptive gamified assessment demonstrates an increasing trend as the experiment progressed. After 4 weeks, the language learning attitude scores of the control and experimental groups were 10 and 47, respectively. By week 16, the experimental group's score increased to 70, and after 20 weeks, the control group's score was 50, while the experimental group's score reached 75. A paired-samples t-test conducted via SPSS indicated that the attitude scores were significantly higher in the experimental group than in the control group (t(44) = -14.47, p  < 0.001, SD = 4.73), as detailed in Table  2 . This significant difference in attitude scores demonstrates the effectiveness of the adaptive gamified assessment in enhancing the language learning attitude of students over the duration of the experiment.

Change of language learning attitude scores of two groups

Figure  5 reveals that as the experiment progressed, the students' dissatisfaction rates with gamification online learning decreased significantly in both groups. Initially, after 4 weeks, the average dissatisfaction rate for the control and experimental groups was 11% and 6%, respectively. As the experiment continued, the dissatisfaction rates declined, dropping to about 5% in the experimental group and 8% in the control group after 20 weeks. Paired t-test results further show a significant decrease in dissatisfaction (t(44) = 10.13, p  < 0.001, SD = 0.87). This suggests a marked downward trend in students' dissatisfaction with gamified online learning over the duration of the study, in accordance with their attitudes towards adaptive gamified assessment.

Variation curve of dissatisfaction rate of gamification in two groups

Our research found that students maintain a positive attitude towards the blended learning model of online assessment, which aligns with previous research (Abduh, 2021 ; Albiladi & Alshareef, 2019 ), indicating that e-assessment can benefit online learning and teaching. However, a deeper comparison between non-gamified and gamified adaptive testing groups in terms of satisfaction and students' subjective perceptions reveals differences. The experimental group, which incorporated gamified adaptive testing, demonstrated a more positive attitude, corroborating the positive role of gamification in education as outlined by Bolat and Taş ( 2023 ). Gamified assessment promotes student motivation in a manner consistent with previous research (Bennani et al., 2022 ), and our study has similarly shown that gamified assessment positively influences learners' behaviors and attitudes (Özhan & Kocadere, 2020 ).

This result appears to contradict the findings of Kwon and Özpolat ( 2021 ), which suggest that gamification of assessments had a significantly adverse effect on students' perceptions of satisfaction and their experience of courses in higher education. Our findings, however, indicate that adaptive gamified assessments enhance motivation and engagement, thus contributing positively to the learning process for young learners. Furthermore, the motivational levels in the experimental group remained stable, whereas motivation in the control group decreased over time. This suggests that adaptive gamified assessments may help to sustain or enhance learner motivation within a blended learning environment.

5.2 Effect of adaptive gamified assessment on learners' motivation

To further examine the effect of adaptive gamified assessments, the standard error of dissatisfaction for both groups was evaluated, while also including a statistical analysis of the distribution of motivation within the experimental group. The outcomes of these analyses are depicted in Fig.  6 .

Changing Curves of Satisfaction of Standard Errors of Two Groups

In Fig.  6 , a notable decrease in standard error scores for both the control and experimental groups is observed as the experiment progresses. Initially, after 4 weeks, the standard error scores stood at 8 for the control group and 5 for the experimental group. At the end of the 20-week study period, these scores had diminished to 5.4 and 2.8, respectively.

This study's findings are consistent with previous research on the benefits of personalization in gamification. Rodrigues et al. ( 2021 ) reported that personalized gamification mitigated negative perceptions of common assessment activities while simultaneously motivating and supporting learners. This reinforces the pivotal role of adaptive assessment in tailoring learning experiences compared to traditional e-assessment methods. Furthermore, structured interviews conducted with the experimental group revealed the distribution of students' motivation in Table  3 . For younger learners, external motivation induced by gamified testing was found to be predominant, with 73% of the children acknowledging its influence. Notably, the tests' impact on students' intrinsic motivation was also significant, especially regarding the sense of competency; 69% of students reported feeling an enhancement in their abilities. This finding presents a nuanced difference from Dahlstrøm's ( 2012 ) proposition that gamified products and services could both facilitate and undermine intrinsic motivation through supporting or neglecting the basic psychological needs for autonomy and competence. It suggests an alternate conclusion: the gamified adaptive assessment enhances intrinsic motivation and participation. Of course, the effectiveness of such interventions is significantly dependent on individual and contextual factors, thus highlighting the adaptive gamified approach's role in effectively moderating these effects.

5.3 Impact of adaptive gamified assessment on academic performance

To evaluate the impact of adaptive gamified assessment on learners’ academic performance, the errors and system score data from the model tests of different groups were organized. Figure  7 depicts the error variation of the system model test, while Fig.  8 analyzes the change curve of the system’s average score data.

Variation curves of test errors of different models in two groups

Change curve of average learning scores of learners in Two Groups

Figure  7 demonstrates that systematic errors in model testing for both groups exhibited a decreasing trend over the course of the experiment. Initially, after 4 weeks, the model test errors were 22% for the control group and 23% for the experimental group. Following 16 weeks, both groups reached a minimum test error value of 3%. However, after 20 weeks, a rebound and increasing trend in model test errors were observed in both groups. Consequently, setting the experiment duration to 16 weeks appears to effectively improve the accuracy of the gamified assessment. A paired-samples t-test in Table  4 indicates a significant reduction in standard error (t(44) = -25.75, p  < 0.001, SD = 2.09), reinforcing the effectiveness of the adaptive gamified strategy optimization in reducing learning standard errors and, consequently, improving learners' efficiency and knowledge acquisition.

As shown in Fig.  8 , the average learning scores of students in both groups increased as the experiment progressed. After four weeks, the average learning score was 25 for the control group and 48 for the experimental group. After 16 weeks, these scores increased to 36 and 66, respectively. By week 20, the average score for the experimental group slightly decreased to 63. This indicates that learners' average scores in different experimental groups peaked after 16 weeks. A comprehensive evaluation, which included a comparison of average learning scores and standard deviation (SD) changes, was used to assess the impact of the gamified assessment. The results are detailed in Table  5 .

These comparisons reveal that adaptive gamified assessments can enhance students' online learning experiences. This supports the findings of Attali and Arieli-Attali ( 2015 ), who demonstrated that under a points-gamification condition, participants, particularly eighth graders, showed higher likeability ratings. Additionally, the effect of gamified assessment on students' final scores was mediated by intrinsic motivation levels. This contrasts with previous studies on gamification in education, such as Alsawaier ( 2018 ), which indicated that students in gamified courses exhibited less motivation and lower final exam scores than those in non-gamified classes. Furthermore, the element of peer competition introduced by gamification was more meaningful to students with better results, aligning with the findings of Göksün and Gürsoy ( 2019 ). Adaptive gamified tests, serving as a formative assessment platform, have been found to positively influence young learners' learning outcomes. Moreover, gamified testing could reduce language anxiety, consistent with the study by Hong et al. ( 2022 ). Compared to traditional gamified assessments, adaptive assessments are better equipped to address issues of repetition and learner capability fit, and they align more closely with the principles of scaffolding in education, thereby enhancing students' academic performance.

6 Conclusion

This research explores the influence of adaptive gamified assessment within a blended learning context on young learners' motivation and academic performance. Grounded in Self-Determination Theory (SDT), this investigation categorizes student motivation and analyzes their engagement and learning capabilities in relation to non-gamified and gamified adaptive tests. The findings suggest that the gamified adaptive test can significantly help learners improve their motivation and foster enhanced language proficiency performance in a blended learning environment.

The study verifies the enhancing effect of gamified evaluation on the internalization of students' motivation (Özhan & Kocadere, 2020 ) and confirms the regulatory role of gamified elements in blended learning, aiding in increasing student participation and satisfaction (Jayawardena et al., 2021 ). Furthermore, the positive role of gamification in language learning and as a tool for reinforcing assessment is corroborated (Priyanti et al., 2019 ). This study extends our understanding of the motivational impacts of gamification in younger education settings, suggesting that while previous research indicated a lesser effect on intrinsic motivation for young learners (Mekler et al., 2017 ), the adaptive mode of gamified assessment could enhance students' sense of competency and, thereby, their intrinsic motivation. Additionally, this research integrates the relationship between motivation and academic level, suggesting that the transition from external motivations provided by rewards in adaptive gamified assessments to enjoying personalized feedback and growth can enhance satisfaction in blended learning, facilitating the internalization of motivation towards participation and language proficiency.

In terms of managerial and policy implications, the introduction of gamification into blended learning environments is advisable, not only as a teaching method but also as an assessment tool. Gamified assessment, with its interactive nature, can be used to alleviate negative impacts of language learning, such as anxiety and lack of confidence, especially for young learners who may benefit from guided external motivational factors. Educators should implement a variety of formative assessments using technology in evaluation activities, especially to promote active learning.

However, the short duration of the experiment and the limited sample size are insufficient to substantiate long-term positive effects of gamification. Future research should delve into a more nuanced examination of students' intrinsic motivation, with longitudinal tracking to observe the internalization of motivation. The inclusion of delayed tests can help study the long-term effects of gamification. Further research could also compare adaptive gamified experiments with gamified experiments to enhance understanding of how gamification influences the internalization of students' intrinsic motivation.

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Zhang, Z., Huang, X. Exploring the impact of the adaptive gamified assessment on learners in blended learning. Educ Inf Technol (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10639-024-12708-w

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Family-Centered Theory of Change

A conceptual framework for improving teaching and learning in undergraduate stem courses .

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