Abstract
Introduction
Entering the post-pandemic era, people still dare not relax their vigilance. It poses different challenges to the student achievement benefits of teaching, particularly in the primary and secondary sectors. The transition from face-to-face to online learning is currently occurring quickly and unexpectedly, especially with the global adoption of Covid-19; as a result, the preparation for online learning must be carefully taken into account in this new educational paradigm (Torun, 2019). The COVID-19 pandemic has challenged the way people work together, especially where tighter and tighter restrictions are in place (Mok et al., 2021).
Under the guidance and advice of the Ministry of Education, education departments and schools at all levels have started online teaching to avoid large gatherings of students and teachers or to maintain a state where classes are temporarily stopped but learning continues. Five departments, including the Ministry of Education and the National Development and Reform Commission, jointly issued the No. 1 document of Education Foundation (2021) which pointed out suggestions on strengthening the construction and application of online education teaching resources in primary and secondary schools The Internet medium as the primary mode of teaching and learning remains a challenge and is usually considered a magnified role of the media in technology and the effect of education way (McCullough, 2021).
Past studies have shown that the status quo of online learning tends to be attendance, tape-broadcast courses, and lack of online teaching technology leading to inadequate preparation for online learning, and anxiety about online learning (Lin & Dai, 2022; Mok et al., 2021; Zuo et al., 2021). Dakhi et al. (2020) suggest that students become familiar with the learning environment using technology. Despite the claims of many academics, flexible interactions between students and teachers as well as between students themselves are made possible by the convergence of technology in online learning (Dakhi et al., 2020). It is necessary to give priority to appropriate teaching methods (e.g., Problem-based learning) to promote learning. New technological innovations - such as analytically personalized feedback for large-scale learning (Pardo et al., 2019) - can also enhance teacher-student interaction.
In addition, the study also shows that the learning effect is not significant, which is related to the lack of implementation of appropriate teaching methods (Mok et al., 2021; Zuo et al., 2021). For policymakers, e-learning programmers, and researchers, understanding student readiness levels and their direct and indirect effects can provide planning guidelines for better learning and student achievement (Lin & Dai, 2022). Education personnel should attach importance to the viewpoint of social constructivism, so that knowledge can be constructed from students. Effective communication improves the chances of successful learning in an e-learning environment (Yan et al., 2021) and helps students participate more successfully in classroom discussions (P. McCullough, 2021).
In this study, the PBL method is adopted to change the role of teachers into instructors, and the Tencent communication software QQ is used to communicate and publish the course content and ask appropriate questions. Through the discussion in the group function, students could group themselves and reasonably divide labor. Watch teaching videos under the conditions of existing learning platforms (national Intelligent Education cloud platform, Guizhou Province Aerial Guizhou Course), or search and collate online materials. During this process, teachers is on call to receive corresponding guidance from students through private chat. At the same time, teachers could also monitor the learning dynamics of students in each group and provided appropriate help in each discussion group.
The research investigates the effectiveness of the PBL instructional strategy with social constructivism in learning online toward the experiment group (EG) of 11-grade students of two Chinese high schools, compared with the control group (CG). The research questions of this study based on those assumptions are the following: (1). Is there a significant difference in student readiness before and after utilizing the PBL pedagogy with social constructivism in learning online? (2). Is there a significant difference between EG and CG in student achievement after utilizing the PBL pedagogy with social constructivism in learning online?
Literature review
Problem-Based Learning with Social Constructivism
The earliest application of PBL was in the realm of medical education in Canada (Barrows & Tamblyn, 1980; Schmitt, 2008), has been widely used in different fields and is still in the stage of continuous development and improvement since then. Researchers provided teachers with a PBL teaching strategy to cope with online teaching during the epidemic situation and set up a network environment for group communication and discussion among students with the help of constructivism (see Figure 1). The advantages of the PBL instructional technique trigger student learning and collaborative communication based on a teacher-mounted teaching framework (Berenji et al., 2020; Tang et al., 2020). It is when the teacher gives the learning setting, and the student is attracted by the problem and then searches for assessment information, building and refining the relevant information of the hypothesis in his mind. The practice framework of the problem-based learning method and social constructivism.
This method is very suitable for online teaching because it is a student-centered method rather than a teacher-centered method. It pays more attention to the students themselves in the class, and the teacher becomes a scaffold in the interactive class, that knowledge is constructed by students belonging to social constructivism (Margolis, 2020). In contrast to the status quo of the Internet in the past, students do not simply watch videos, but actively research problems, apply theories and exercises, and propose useful information and strategies (Baresh et al., 2019). In addition, in constructivist theory, students compile internal representations of the information they seek and interpret their own unique understandings (Aljohani, 2017). Through interactive modules, group discussions, and decentralized management of the whole group, students actively participate in the integration of the class, communicating and exploring with teachers and peers in a social constructivist environment. Social constructivism shares a broader perspective than the traditional single-teacher perspective (Amineh & Asl, 2015). Forced e-learning, changing the single output from teacher to student, expands the network into a basic link that helps students modify, develop, and shape their own data structures.
Online Learning Readiness
The readiness of a person to engage in learning activities in an online environment is described by the idea of online learning readiness (OLR) and the degree of students’ representation of e-learning (Liu, 2019). Aspects involving personal knowledge, cognitive learning strategies, and motivation for effective online learning styles (Yurdugül & Demir, 2017). The impact of e-learning is constrained by the readiness of the students for online learning.
Scholars have initially divided OLR into three parts: communication ability, technical ability, and social ability (Liu, 2019). The skills and sense of control needed to manage social situations, build and maintain relationships are called social competence. Communicative competence is defined as “the ability to demonstrate appropriate knowledge in a given social communication situation”. Technical competence is “the use of online learning resources and technologies in technology to improve learning quality”. Yu (2018) further divided social competence into social competence with mentors and social competence with classmates.
Studies have shown that students have a negative attitude towards learning preparation for online learning, and lack of interaction and video in the online learning environment, which leads to a sense of isolation and loneliness, leading to a sense of disconnection from the learning community (Bowers & Kumar, 2015). This could be due to the fact that many Chinese teachers are unprepared for the abrupt move to online learning or that the heavy emphasis on online learning in teaching reforms presents difficulties for many pupils (Mok et al., 2021). Therefore, improving learners' social competence can help students to integrate academically into an e-learning environment. At the same time, communication skills also help students to seek help and peer support and learn from each other, thus improving the learning effect of online learning. Torun (2019) recommends rapid and rigorous e-readiness studies to help relevant practitioners better maintain e-learning practices.
On the contrary, online teaching also has its advantages and is praised for the smooth and relaxed atmosphere created by its structure and anonymity, especially for high school students (Zuo et al., 2021). Students also have expectations for online learning. They can favor online learning resources as well as seek timely and abundant additional learning support functions and materials (Yan et al., 2021).
Learning Online and Achievement
In most online teaching in China, the online learning mode of primary and middle school students is still largely imitating the teacher-centered and lecture-based face-to-face learning mode. The common teacher-student interaction modules are roll call and live chat. The more dynamic asynchronous discussions are less common, and the technology-based pop-up quizzes, project reviews, and other forms of online interaction are even rarer, suggesting that Chinese schools do not fully utilize the collaborative capabilities of online tools (Hernández-Sellés et al., 2019). A large number of students believe that this form will not improve their academic performance.
Students learning online do not receive timely and continuous guidance from teachers as they do in face-to-face classes, which will have a negative impact on their emotional health and academic performance (Niemi & Kousa, 2020; Yates et al., 2021). Sadly, the quality of instruction in online learning has greatly decreased, and most of the time, kids must deal with learning problems on their own (Barbour, 2018). Additionally, it is difficult to establish and carry out student learning plans, participate in synchronous online learning, use a variety of online learning features, and have meaningful peer interactions while doing so because of a lack of metacognitive skills (Barbour, 2018).
According to the poll, students’ grades have dramatically declined, and online instruction during the COVID-19 response has had a particularly severe effect on students’ achievement in science-related courses (Guo et al., 2022). WeChat calls, online Q&A, and live online instruction were also discovered to be well-liked supplemental teaching methods. On the other hand, a relatively small number of teachers use video recording to offer pre-recorded courses and online conferences for online teaching. In the online teaching environment, there is relatively little interaction between teachers and students (Yan et al., 2021).
On the other hand, online learning also has its advantages for academic achievement. In the evaluation of students’ online learning and ability training at the University of Hong Kong during the COVID-19 pandemic, the analysis pointed out that the effectiveness of online learning on whole-person development and active student learning would be affected by teachers’ teaching, but should not be limited to this (Mok et al., 2021). Positive interactions with peers and teachers can enhance students’ learning motivation and promote learning performance, and these interactions are beneficial to their emotional health and academic performance. Online teaching, supported by online learning practitioners, can establish students’ own learning goals, and needs, and give students the responsibility to select and implement appropriate learning strategies for students, to improve their academic results (Torun, 2019).
Methodology
Research design
A quasi-experimental research design is for demonstrating the efficacy of interventions, which is a popular and rigorous experimental methodology (Miller et al., 2020). This research investigated the effectiveness of the PBL pedagogy in learning online between EG and CG among 11-grade students’ readiness and achievement in Chinese high schools shown in Figure 2. The research site is deliberately chosen by purposive sampling (Taherdoost, 2016) because the outbreak policy is flexible and silent, and students in Guiyang were forced to continue teaching online to prevent the spread of infection. For the population, a lottery to choose two classes of students in Chinese high schools in Guiyang city, Guizhou province. And simple random sampling to choose two classes of there (Taherdoost, 2016). A fully intact class and not individuals are selected as samples. Research design.
Firstly, securing the approval of the school administration and local education department, and implementing the lesson schedule that the researcher created were based on the Grade 11 English curriculum norm for high school. The PBL intervention would be used in EG for 8 weeks, at the same time both groups are learning online. For specific interference schemes, the teacher introduces PBL teaching strategies through group messages and passes a mind map. Students voluntarily form the discussion group function of the QQ group to establish their own team. After the learning content outline is briefly introduced through ‘Tencent Classroom’, which is similar to ‘Zoom’, ‘Google Classroom’, the students grouped themselves to collect and integrate the information by recording and broadcasting, network resources, and so on. Finally, the whole class demonstrates, debates, and exchanges opinions. Different groups expressed their opinions and teachers gave timely feedback.
Duration of the data collection, the researcher sent the readiness questionnaire to the EG student in 1st and 8th weeks, which is a 5-point Likert scale adapted from Yu & Richardson (2015) directly, contains 20 items consisting of four dimensions of technical competencies, social competencies with the instructor, social competencies with classmates and communication competencies of number 6, 5, 5, 4 respectively. The last offline achievement test before the homing quarantine is to be the pre-test to ensure whether EG and CG are at the same level, and after returning to school to be post-test, with a full score of 150.
Validation and Reliability
For validation, these two instruments are validated by 6 experienced high school English teachers. The widely used Content Validity Index (CVI) of Polit and Beck (2006) is used to assess the content validity of multi-item scales. The term “scale-level CVI” refers to the average of the item-level CVIs after adding and dividing them by the item’s quantity. The researcher calculated the value of S-CVI as 0.93 for the readiness questionnaire and the same result is 1.00 for the achievement test, which is more than 0.90 and means high validation in these instruments (Polit & Beck, 2006).
A pilot study is conducted on 30 pupils from school X who never participated in the research to examine the instruments’ reliability. The Cronbach’s alpha value for the students’ readiness questionnaire using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 26 is 0.91, which shows high reliability because of high consistency in the range of 0.70–0.95 (Yusup, 2018).
Results
Demographic Information
Simple Demographic Information.
Findings of students’ readiness
Paired Sample T-test in Students’ Readiness (
For the normality test, the Skewness value of the before score in readiness is 65. And Kurtosis is .61, which is in the range of ±1.0, so the data is normally distributed. Similarly, the after-readiness scores of Skewness and Kurtosis are −.55 and .08, revealing the distribution is normal. In addition, the before and after scores of students’ readiness all showed the points formed a linear pattern in the Q-Q plot.
For the sub-dimensions of TC, SCI, SCC, CC of EG (−.18, 1.38), (−.07, −.48), (−.09, −82), (−.30, −92) separately and in the before are (−.09, −1.628), (−.04, −.40), (.68, .28), (.50, −.19) respectively, those data are all in the range of ±2.0 and can do the inferential statistics. In addition, the Q-Q plot depicts a linear pattern in the four sub-dimensions scores not only before but also after the experiment.
The paired sample t-test is calculated in the readiness score and its dimensions of EG students, results show that there is a significant correlation (
The results also showed that there is a significant difference
Findings of students’ achievement
Descriptive Statistics of Students’ Achievement Scores (
The normality test of achievement pre-test in EG (Skewness = −.08, Kurtosis = −.36) and CG (Skewness = .32, Kurtosis = .28) shows the normal distribution in the range of ±1.0. On the other side, post-test achievement scores are normally distributed in EG (Skewness = .35, Kurtosis = −.90) and CG (Skewness = −.12, Kurtosis = 1.50) due to being in the range of ±2.0. The linear patterns are all formed in the Q-Q plot of EG and CG of achievement pre-test and post-test scores.
Achievement Post-test Results - Test of Between-Subjects Effects (
aR Squared = .950 (Adjusted R Squared = .949).
Apre = Achievement pre-test.
After controlling for pre-intervention scores, the Fear of Statistics Test post-intervention scores for the two intervention groups differed significantly
Discussion
The results showed that the learning readiness of the students improved under the PBL method, and supports the view of Torun (2019). The system function under the PBL technique framework becomes more suitable for students’ reality and meets different students’ learning needs, such as in real-time voting, interface sharing, etc. In general, compared with watching live courses, students are not worried about the online learning form because of the lack of an interactive online course mode. The PBL teaching method integrates online learning and emphasizes the teaching technology of student-centered learning, which changes knowledge from passive absorption to active exploration and enhances learning interest. This confirms the theory of Zuo et al. (2021) and Yan et al. (2021), it stimulates students with better psychology willing to take their role in the group and actively participate in discussions online. In addition, the form of division of labor and cooperation allows textbook knowledge to be constructed by students themselves, making e-learning conducive to student readiness. This finding is associated with social constructivism (Margolis, 2020). Knowledge is constructed when social, especially for language subjects, the communication between students and the network and the discussion of components form their knowledge and deepen the influence of language learning.
Social competencies with classmates of students are conducive to this treatment. This is related to Mok et al. (2021) consistently preferring more opportunities for peer interaction. Compared with the conventional PBL teaching method, this is due to the convenience of network communication, information storage, record review, and other functions overcome the communication limitations of face-to-face learning, students are more willing to freely express their ideas. This is in line with Yan et al. (2021), that online communication is more convenient rather than offline courses.
In making joint efforts to the communication competencies, intervention plays an important increase role. The communication ability of Internet students plays the most important role in influencing their autonomous learning ability. The development of a group cooperation mode exercises students' leadership, decision-making ability, and so on. This result provides evidence to support the study of Lin & Dai (2022). Will learn knowledge division of inquiry understanding, in collaboration to build group results. In the process, students not only learn knowledge but also develop a sense of control in managing social situations and the skills and abilities necessary to build and maintain relationships. Zuo et al. (2021) suggested that the synergistic effect of online tools should be amplified.
Admittedly, to satisfy the need for learning achievement, the experimental group showed a significant increase compared with the control group. Under the PBL instruction, students accumulate knowledge, deepen the learning effect, and improve their academic performance. This conclusion rejected the thought of Guo et al. (2022), adding interest in long-run communication, the humanization of network software reflects its advantages. Discussion groups and network resources are integrated under social constructivism, and better cohesion in the classroom atmosphere means the whole class is active. This is in line with Dakhi et al. (2020). The convenience and efficiency of the network benefit knowledge construction. At the same time, when learning English, different expressions among students and a variety of translation software increase the possibility and diversity of students’ English learning. On the other hand, from the perspective of educators, rather than playing videos, they can better participate in the construction of classroom knowledge. They can also watch real-time, as well as search and look up what they have missed understand students’ ideas more closely. This contributes to the suggestion of Mok et al. (2021).
Conclusion
In conclusion, this study plays a positive role in both teachers' online teaching and students' online learning. To explore and support effective teaching strategies and skills to cope with the current domestic “dynamic zero” policy, which means schools need to shift online to prevent the spread of Covid-19, to achieve the goal of continuous learning not being interrupted due to classroom out. This study also demonstrates this point of view through experiments.
Attach great importance to the implication. PBL is an instructional technique that emphasizes student-centered learning, and high school students are given access to an engaging, flexible learning environment. The new situation has forced distance learning to become the norm in China. Teachers transfer knowledge into scaffolding for students to build knowledge independently. Pre-class guidance, and in-class guidance care, help students adapt to online learning and guide them to collaborate in building course knowledge.
Promote the recommendation. For the education department and school to give some inspiration, in view of this challenge to reform the education environment, an intelligent education cloud platform should be promoted. For teachers, the relevant training in network teaching and the continuous learning of 21st-century educational technology should be carried out to promote the cooperation mode of multi-development with the network, such as blended teaching and the application of network multimedia. For students, encourage and actively use the Internet and mobile phones to promote their multi-dimensional development, innovation ability and critical thinking.
Due to the limitations of this study, future researchers can expand the study sample and explore more detailed techniques and teaching methods that are helpful for teaching. At the same time, it is also possible to compare the different research places, because students in urban and rural areas will be affected by the infrastructure development and growth environment, resulting in a larger gap.
