Learning, education and collaboration with the support of digital technology

Due to COVID-19, 2020 was a challenging year for many, including those within education. Indeed, the impact on the psychology of education was profound and far reaching. Abrupt changes in the learning environment worldwide, including the sudden lockdown of schools, involuntary switching from face-to-face to online instruction and the massive number of students having to cope with parents losing their jobs overnight or even deaths in the family, call for action-relevant research efforts from multiple educational and psychological perspectives in order to generate new knowledge to inform instructional design, assessment, evaluation and educational policies.

Contributing to the scholarship on psychological aspects of education is the mission of this journal, Educational Psychology: An International Journal of Experimental Educational Psychology. Therefore, the journal presents high-quality empirical research that is relevant to, and extends the literature on, the promotion of learning and teaching across year levels from pre-school to tertiary levels. The two special issues published in 2020, namely Civic Education for Alienated, Disaffected and Disadvantaged Students, and Technology-enhanced Learning and Assessment, are particularly pertinent in the current pandemic-stricken school context. A special issue on the educational psychology of learning, teaching and well-being during COVID-19 and beyond (Guest Editors Dr. Ronnel B. King and Professor Ching-Sing Chai) is scheduled for publication in 2022. A call for papers will be announced soon.

Through these difficult times, it has been immensely heartening to witness the comradeship of the educational psychology community in extending our knowledge boundary. Despite challenges in 2020, the journal successfully published Volume 40, composed of 10 issues, including two special issues, and the impact factor of the journal rose to 1.586. Included in the 10 issues of Volume 40 were 67 empirical studies by 217 distinguished international scholars from 88 universities/institutes of 27 countries and economies. Each of these studies carries significant messages that inspire and inform policy, research and instructional practice. The success of the journal is the result of a concerted effort from the editorial team, comprising 162 eminent scholars offering generous and gratuitous support in the leadership roles of the Advisory Board, Associate Editors and Consulting Editors. We are particularly grateful to the 248 highly proficient and dedicated pro bono anonymous reviewers from 137 universities and 33 countries. Their expert critiques and advice strengthened the articles remarkably.

The current issue, Volume 41 Issue 1, comprising reports on six outstanding empirical studies, is further proof of our continuing commitment to advancing the field of educational psychology. Participants of the six studies reported here were students in higher education from China, Cuba, the Netherlands and the USA. These studies share in common their focus on solid grounding on theories, strong rationale, learner agency, valid research design and well-specified research processes which lead to robust sets of results that are informative for the discipline.

The theme running through Volume 41 Issue 1 is learning, education and collaboration with the support of digital technology. Digital technology developments offer special possibilities for learners to collaborate on learning activities across geographically dispersed locations, an affordance germane to the current novel pandemic context where most formal teaching activities around the world have precipitously changed to online formats. Nevertheless, education leaders (Fischer et al., 2020; Fullan, 2020; Martin et al., 2020; Resing et al., 2020) warn that, even though technology affordances give unprecedented opportunities for revolutionary redesign of learning, education and collaboration, technology applications in instruction without good pedagogy or acknowledgement of learners’ diverse backgrounds can do more harm than good. Four articles (Fiorella & Pilegard, 2020; Heddy et al., 2020; Jiang et al., 2020; Wang et al., 2020) in this issue highlight the importance of incorporating context (e.g., the presence/absence of seductive details in the learning materials in Wang et al., 2020) in technology-supported instructional designs. Further, in an era where digital technology is common practice in teaching and learning, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD, 2019) identified social and emotional skills such as empathy and collaboration to be as important as cognitive skills in becoming responsible citizens, if not more so. Three articles (Giel et al., 2020; Jiang et al., 2020; Morell et al., 2020) focus attention on collaborative learning in technology-supported learning contexts.

In the first article of Volume 41 Issue 1, Jiang et al. (2020) report their randomised control experiment on the comparison between the effectiveness of face-to-face and computer-mediated collaborative learning in promoting writing skills for English as a foreign language among first-year graduate students in China. Through the theoretical lenses of cognitive load theory (Sweller, 2008) and split-attention effect, Jiang et al. (2020) hypothesise the face-to-face condition to be more beneficial, and report that the hypothesis is supported by their data. Based on the findings, Jiang et al. (2020) recommend teachers approximate face-to-face collaborative conditions as much as possible in designing virtual collaborative instructions for optimal benefits to learners of foreign languages.

The next contribution by Wang et al. (2020) explores how perceptive load moderates the effect of seductive details (i.e., information which was interesting but irrelevant to the learning objectives) on the learning of undergraduate students in computer-based multimedia learning environments. Using a 2 × 2 factorial design randomised controlled experiment, with seductive details (with or without) and perceptual load (high or low) as between-subject factors, the authors find that, when the perceptual load is high, seductive details do not affect the learning of students as measured by free-recall tasks and a multiple-choice test designed to gauge conceptual understanding, but when the perceptual load is low, learning effectiveness is adversely affected by seductive details.

In the third article, Fiorella and Pilegard (2020) use two randomised experiments to explore the effect on college students of learner-generated explanations after a multimedia lesson on restudying behaviour (eye movements) and learning. Each of these experiments made use of a 2 × 2 design, with lesson format (the text and graphics were either separated or integrated) and a generative learning strategy (students were either invited or not invited to give an explanation on the studied materials) as between-subject factors. The two experiments differed in the nature of the explanation required of the participants. In the first experiment, students in the experimental group were invited to write a retention-based explanation, and the results showed that these students spent more time on the text and less time on the graphics of the study materials than students in the comparison group. In the second experiment, students in the experimental group were invited to write a transfer-based explanation but no significant difference was found between the experimental and control groups.

Grounded on previous research on the use, change, value (UCV) intervention in facilitating graduate students’ transformative experiences, perceived instrumentality and interest for engineering courses taught in face-to-face mode, in the fourth article Heddy et al. (2020) explore the impact of the intervention for the courses delivered in an online format, as well as the differential effect of perceived interest and interest on transformative experiences (a) between groups with or without UCV intervention and (b) between gender. The authors made use of a quasi-experimental design with students randomly allocated to the experimental (using UCV) and the comparison (traditional) groups, both measured pre- and post-intervention. Their findings show that the UCV intervention had a marginal effect only on transformative experiences but no significant differences were found between the groups on students’ perceived instrumentality and interest. Further, differential effects between groups as well as between gender were found. The findings are explained in terms of compromised social interactions and teacher scaffolding in online delivery as compared to face-to-face teaching contexts.

In the fifth article, Giel et al. (2020) examine the extent to which compatibility in achievement goals (mastery-approach and performance-approach goals) between an individual student and the learning group to which the student belonged affected the individual’s engagement and performance when the student and the group studied in a self-directed, student-centred, collaborative learning context. The study sample comprised undergraduate psychology students randomly allocated to collaborative groups which were then randomly allocated to teachers. Giel et al. (2020) report that both the degree and the direction of incongruence in mastery-approach goals between the individual student and the group were associated with the student’s group engagement, but only the degree of incongruence was associated with the student’s performance. In contrast, neither engagement nor performance was found to be associated with compatibility in performance-approach goals. Of note is the sophisticated and meticulously undertaken statistical analyses in this study which enabled non-linear effects of the complicated transactions between individual and group achievement goals to be identified and delineated.

In the final article of this issue, Morell et al. (2020) investigate collaborative learning in the context of small groups formed spontaneously (SSGs) by students as an active agent of the learning process instead of by teacher intervention. The study focusses attention on connections between the cognitive concept of personal epistemological beliefs of individual university students and characteristics of the SSG to which the student belonged. The study identifies differences between junior and senior students in the association between group size and personal epistemological beliefs. For junior students, the larger the group size, the more students held naïve beliefs about the source of knowledge. For senior students, passiveness in learning was inversely correlated to both group size and the number of group membership. Further, lone learners and learners in SSGs differed in their beliefs about the speed of learning. Gender differences are also identified in the study.

In summary, the articles in this issue of Educational Psychology are both engaging and accessible. It is hoped that this issue not only provides invaluable new evidence on specific aspects of digital technology-supported learning and collaboration at the higher education level, but also that it furnishes stimulus for professional reflection on how the research findings can be applied and extended to heightening learning outcomes at tertiary and more junior levels of education at this time of crisis. Please join me in congratulating the authors for their achievements. Special thanks are due to all anonymous reviewers who contributed enormously to the enhancement of the articles presented here.