arXiv subjects

Javier Pulgar

Publications and source records attributed to Javier Pulgar.

7 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2023

Affinity-Based Groups in Secondary Education: Increased Stability at the Expense of Collaboration

Group configurations play a pivotal role in shaping social skills and learning outcomes by fostering student interaction and collaboration. Yet, the factors influencing group formation, social cohesion, and group stability remain understudied. Here, we examine these factors in a cohort of 90 students from 9th and 10th grades at a private school in Chile. Students were either randomly assigned to groups (control) or allowed to choose their own groups (experimental) for a semester-long project. Our results show that self-selected groups had stronger friendship ties by the end of the semester. In contrast, randomly assigned groups exhibited higher levels of cooperation and more frequent membership changes, indicating weaker social cohesion. Additionally, 10th-grade students were more likely to stay in their original groups, possibly suggesting increased social maturity. These findings underscore the ongoing challenge in education of balancing student choice in group formation with the need for diverse group compositions that enhance learning. The study provides actionable insights for educators.

physics.ed-ph↗

arXiv2022

Interconnectedness in Education Systems

Underlying complex systems, there is a rich web of interconnected components that determine the relational properties of the system. Yet, traditional methods used in education sciences often disregard the underlying complexity of the educational system and, consequently, its emergence phenomena. Here, we argue that an interconnected vision of educational systems -- from classrooms to an organizational level -- is key to improving learning, social integration, well-being, and decision making, all fundamental aspects of the educational experience. Understanding the education system as an interconnected network of people, degree programs, and institutions requires methods and concepts from computational social sciences. Thus, we can leverage institutional records and (quasi) experimental designs to elicit the relational maps of key players in education and derive their implications in their functioning at all scales. In different settings, from elementary classrooms to higher education programs, we show how mapping the network relationships between entities can lead to the inference of novel insights about education systems and the development of solutions with societal implications.

physics.ed-ph↗

arXiv2022

Long-term collaboration with strong friendship ties improves academic performance in remote and hybrid teaching modalities in high school physics

Collaboration among students is fundamental for knowledge building and competency development. Yet, the effectiveness of student collaboration depends on the extent that these interactions occur under conditions that favor commitment, trust, and decision-making among those who interact. The sanitary situation and the transition to emergency remote teaching have added new challenges for collaboration, mainly because now, Information and Communication Technologies mediate students' interactions. This study first explores the effectiveness of different collaborative relationships on physics from a sample of secondary students from two schools located in rural and urban areas in southern Chile. We used Social Network Analysis to map students' academic prestige, collaboration, and friendship ties. We define a strong association if two students are declared mutually as friends. Using multiple linear regression models, we found positive effects of collaboration on grades, particularly among students working with friends (strong ties). Then, the second study corresponds to a quasi-experiment on four classes at the analyzed urban school during the following academic year. Here, students attended hybrid sessions to test whether the effects of collaboration found on the first study were stable throughout two semesters. Following the same procedures as in the exploratory phase, we found that the initial effects of collaboration on grades are negative for all collaborative variables, while strong working ties afford academic gains later into the year. These results contribute to the literature of collaboration in physics education and its effectiveness, taking into account social relationships and the needed time for developing beneficial collective processes among students in the classroom.

physics.ed-ph↗

arXiv2021

Student networks on online teaching due to COVID-19: Academic effects of strong friendship ties and perceived academic prestige in physics and mathematics courses

Collaboration among students is fundamental for knowledge building and competency development. Nonetheless, the effectiveness of student collaboration depends on the extent that these interactions take place under conditions that favor commitment, trust, and decision-making among those who interact. The sanitary situation and the transition to remote teaching has added new challenges for collaboration given that students' interactions are mediated by Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). In this study we explore the effectiveness of different collaborative relationships on physics and mathematics, from a sample of secondary students from two schools located in rural and urban areas in southern Chile. We used Social Network Analysis (SNA) to map students' friendships relations, academic prestige, and collaboration on both courses. Later we combined the collaboration network with friendship and academic prestige on the course, to separate strong from weak friendship working ties, and those among students who enjoy or not academic prestige. Multiple linear regression models showed, on average, positive effects of collaboration on grades. Yet, when isolating the effects of the types of collaboration, the positive effects are observed only between those who display more strong friendship ties. Also, we found differences on the social networks and their effects over grades between both courses, presumably due to their pedagogical nature. With these results we contribute to the literature of collaboration and its effectiveness based on the nature of students' relationships, and advocate for the importance of instructional design in fostering appropriate motivations and guidelines for constructive collaboration in the classroom.

physics.ed-ph↗

arXiv2020

Investigating how students collaborate to generate physics problems through structured tasks

Traditionally, scholars in physics education research pay attention to students solving well-structured learning activities, which provide restricted room for collaboration and idea-generation due to their close-ended nature. In order to encourage the socialization of information among group members, we utilized a real-world problem where students were asked to generate a well-structured physics task, and investigated how student groups collaborated to create physics problems for younger students at an introductory physics course at a university in northern Chile. Data collection consists of audio recording the group discussions while they were collaborating to develop their physics problems as well as the solutions they created to their problems. Through interviews, we accessed students' perceptions on the task and its challenges. Results suggest that generating problems is an opportunity for students to propose ideas and make decisions regarding the goals of the problem, concepts and procedures, contextual details and magnitudes and units to introduce in their generated problems. In addition, we found evidence that groups tested the validity of their creations by engaging in strategies often observed with algebra-based physics problems, such as mathematical procedures and qualitative descriptions of the physics embedded in the problem, yet groups invested more time with algebra-based strategies compared to more qualitative descriptions. Students valued the open-ended nature of the task and recognized its benefits in utilizing physics ideas into context, which in turn enabled collaboration in a way not experienced with traditional algebra-based problems. These findings support the use of generative activities as a pathway for students to engage in real-world physics problems that allow for a range and variety of collective processes and ideas.

physics.ed-ph↗

arXiv2020

Undergrad classroom cooperation and academic performance: Beneficial for real-world-like problems but detrimental for algebra-based problems

For several decades, scholars have studied cooperation and its outcomes in the educational context. Yet, we lack a complete understanding of how different instructional strategies impact the relationship between cooperation and learning. Here we studied how different instructional strategies led to different social configurations and their differences in individual academic performance in an experiment with 82 first-year students from an introductory physics course. Surprisingly, we found that students who actively seek out information on multiple peers are less likely to achieve good performance on well-structured (algebra-based) problems, whereas, for ill-structured (real-world-like) problems, this effect depended on the features of the learning environment. Besides, we observed that good performance on ill and well-structured problems responded to different social network configurations. In a highly clustered network (which contains redundant information), students performed well-structured problems better than ill-structured problems. In contrast, students with access to network structural holes (which enable access to more diverse information) performed ill-structured problems better than well-structured problems. Finally, ill-structured problems could promote creative thinking, provided that instructors guide the solving process and motivate students to engage in the appropriate cognitive demands these problems entail. Our results suggest that teaching and instructional strategies play an important role in cooperative learning; therefore, educators implementing cooperative learning methods have to accompany them with adequate instructional strategy.

physics.ed-ph↗

arXiv2019

Physics problems and instructional strategies for developing social networks in university classrooms

In this study, we explored the extent to which problems and instructional strategies affect social cohesion and interactions for information seeking in physics classrooms. Three sections of a mechanics physics course taught at a Chilean University in Coquimbo were investigated. Each section had a weekly problem-solving session using different sets of well and/or ill-structured problems (i.e., algebra-based and open-ended problems respectively), as well as instructional strategies for guiding the problem-solving sessions. Data was collected on networks of information seeking and perceptions of good physics students, during a problem-solving session. We used social network analysis (SNA) for constructing variables while conducting the study. Results suggest that the teaching and learning strategies to guide problem-solving of well and ill-structured problems yield different levels of social interaction among classmates, and significant levels of activity in seeking out information for learning and problem-solving. While strategies for guiding problem-solving lend to significant differences for network connectivity, well and ill-structured physics problems predict similar levels of social activity.

physics.ed-ph↗