Student Voice in Digital Classrooms:The Use of Digital Tools for Continuous Student Feedback Collection

For the proposed paper we report on the use of diverse digital tools for continuous student feedback collection and discuss students’ perceptions of and preferences for different approaches, with the aim of illustrating the influence of digital technologies on student voice. Five different digital tools have been investigated:TodaysMeet,Wiki,Padlet,Socrative, and WhatsApp. Eighty-eight non-English major freshmen from six randomly grouped classes at a Hong Kong university participated in the study. They were all enrolled in a credit-bearing course taught by one of the authors. After finishing all lectures of the course,we conducted a questionnaire survey among the participants,asking them what approach to feedback collection they felt most or least effective for communicating their feedback to teachers and classmates, which tool they felt most or least interesting, which tool they felt most or least convenient,and what advantages and disadvantages the five different digital tools have respectively. We also interviewed twenty participants to obtain further explanations of their answers to the questionnaires. The results showed that generally Padlet was regarded as the most liked and Wiki the least liked tool by the participants.Students highly valued features like effectiveness and interestingness, and considered convenience comparatively less important.

Ongoing Doctoral Study Process to Live by:A Narrative Inquiry into the Doctoral Identity Construction Experiences-A Chinese Case

The study employs a narrative inquiry approach to probe a Chinese doctoral student’s identity construction experiences fraught with interruption and transformation.The longitudinal narratives gathered through participant entries in Evernote,a face-to-face life story interview,and researcher memos,have enabled a dynamic configuration of the intellectual,social,emotional,and spiritual dimensions characterizing doctoral identity development.Using identity-trajectory as an analytical lens,the study highlights how individual agency is embodied and exercised in institutional,relational,and personal spaces where doctoral identity is formed and contested.Findings are episodically ordered as:beginning doctoral study with great expectations;conceptualizing the nature of becoming a doctoral student;forces that are disruptive to the development of the doctoral-researcher identity;the ongoing process of being mediated by socialization into an extended research community,socio-professional support,and agentic reflexivity over time.The study argues for using narrative inquiry to speak of and express the subtleties and continuities of doctoral students’experiences.It also provides practical implications for action by supervisors and students in doctoral programs respectively.