Assessment of Three-Dimensional Engagement Levels in a Global Peer Learning Environment

Abstract

The global learning classroom is an emerging educational trend. The iPodia alliance promotes its peer-learning pedagogy by offering engineering classes with universities around the world. Students’ engagement as one of the important metrics to assess the effectiveness of education design methodology has been under considerable interest for several years. Tri-engagement, comprised of behavioral, cognitive, and emotional engagement provides a comprehensive assessment of learning success. This paper illustrates how a tri-engagement assessment was implemented in a global learning environment and examines the effectiveness of the peer-learning pedagogy in such highly diverse environment. This paper proposes a quantitative method using a modified Likert scale to assess students’ tri-engagement levels comprised of student and teaching assistant surveys, video observations, and analysis of facial emotion recognition, through preparation, data collection, and analysis stages. Comparisons of tri-engagements between the instructor-student activities and the peer-peer discussions, different continent regions, and on-site/remote learning are offered. Results show that the overall iPodia peer-learning activities experienced all positive tri-engagement levels and were not significantly affected by the region diversity (< 6% difference) or the remote learning (< 3% difference) of the iPodia learning classroom. That preliminarily proved that the iPodia peer-learning pedagogy maintains positive tri-engagements in a global engineering class. Additional findings were that the self-raters and observers experienced students’ cognitive engagement differently, and cultural difference would mainly affect students’ behavioral engagement, but unfamiliarity of the content may increase their emotional engagement.