-
Description: Agency in patient partners refers to their ability to regulate, control, and monitor their involvement in research. This concept, known as Patient Agency in Research (PAIR), highlights the importance of patients’ cognitive, emotional, and behavioral regulation in their research participation. PAIR, based on Bandura’s definition of human agency and expanded by Code, includes four key functions: intentionality (forming action plans), forethought (setting goals and predicting outcomes), self-reactiveness (planning and self-regulating participation), and self-reflectiveness (evaluating and adjusting involvement). Patients exercise agency through individual, proxy, and collective forms, influencing research directly, through others, or collaboratively. The PATIENT program focuses on enhancing PAIR, emphasizing health literacy, engagement levels, decision-making participation, and long-term communication within research teams.
Project Page: https://alivelab.ca/project/patient/
Funded by:
-
Description: As creative thinking, problem-solving and inquiry learning are primary goals of teaching and learning, immersive and virtual environments designed using principles relevant to solving authentic ill-structured problems are critical for lifelong learning and transfer to novel contexts. Further, on the axiom that ‘learners are agents’, it follows that an understanding of human agency is necessary to fully appreciate how learning occurs. Agency is an emergent capability manifested in a students’ ability to interact with personal, behavioural, environmental, and social factors in the learning context. Agency is inherent in students’ ability to regulate, control, and monitor their learning. Research suggests that agency mediates goal orientations, student perceptions of the learning environment, social identification, the learning strategies they use, and overall academic performance. Agency enables students’ decision-making around what and how something is learned. In other words, learner agency is a capacity of students to act and engage within the learning environment, ultimately enabling student voice and choice in their education. Building on our previous SSHRC-funded research using evidence-centred game design (ECGD), this project aims to examine learner agency and complex STEM inquiry reasoning by enhancing a novel evaluation framework built on the use of 3DIVEs as a formative assessment platform.
Project Page: https://alivelab.ca/project/alive/
Funded by:
-
Description: Internet algorithms are automated mathematical processes that use different types of data to make decisions and recommendations. Increasingly, algorithms shape nearly every aspect of our daily lives (Kitchin, 2017). For example, algorithms are used in medicine to predict the likelihood that individuals will develop certain diseases (Miotto et al., 2016), are used by some employers as a means of determining which job applicants should be contacted for an interview (Bogen, 2019), and have been used by law enforcement agencies to decide who to arrest (Hill, 2022). In education, algorithms have been used to determine teacher promotion and pay (Kantayya, 2020), predict student grades (Gkontzis et al., 2018), and assess student awards for higher education funding based on willingness to pay (Engler, 2021). Algorithms also have a profound but typically invisible impact on our daily lives, as nearly every action on the internet is shaped by algorithmic decision-making (Kitchen, 2017). According to Dogruel (2021), “algorithms filter the news we see, influence decisions about what we buy and at what price, determine the type of music we listen to or govern whom we interact within social media” (p. 68). Most significantly, big data and deep learning have allowed algorithms to engage in extreme personalization when filtering and making recommendations; thus, each of us is presented with our version of reality (Just & Latzer, 2017). That is not to say we are entirely at the mercy of algorithms; rather, “algorithms have to be considered as embedded in a complex ecosystem with shared agency between humans and software components that permanently shape each other” (Dogruel, 2021, p. 69.)
To exercise agency in the human-algorithm relationship, one must possess algorithm literacy (also called algorithmic literacy). Algorithmic literacy can be defined as awareness of algorithm use, knowledge about algorithms, ability to evaluate algorithms critically, and ability to apply coping behaviours when engaging with algorithmic systems (Dogruel et al., 2021). The body of scholarly literature concerning algorithm literacy is rapidly growing. A Google Scholar search conducted on April 19, 2022, using the search string (“algorithm literacy” OR “algorithmic literacy”) yielded 545 results, 430 of which have been published since the year 2018. As recent news coverage makes clear (e.g., Dragicevic, 2022; Hao, 2022), there is a crucial need for algorithm literacy in our daily lives. Through this SSHRC Explore Grant, we will undertake a systematic literature review with the goal of better understanding the present state of algorithm literacy research and synthesizing practical implications, with a focus on human agency in the human-algorithm relationship.
Project Page: https://alivelab.ca/project/algorithm-literacy/
Funded by:
-
Description: The global pandemic’s impact on the job market has increased the pressure on workers to build new skills with a renewed focus on lifelong learning in virtual contexts (OECD, 2020). Professional agency is needed to develop one’s work network and to renegotiate work-related identities during changing economic times (Biesta, 2010). The concept of agency has become widely used in learning research, especially as it relates to professional and workplace learning (Etalapelto et al., 2013). Agency is the capability of individuals to make choices and exert control over and give direction to one’s life (Biesta & Tedder, 2007; Martin, 2004). Through changing working life conditions, coping with transitions and managing amid trying times, people need to create subjectively meaningful careers (Etalapelto et al., 2013). In a recent study by Sannino, Engeström and Jokinen (2021), digital peer learning (DPL) through a community of practice (CoP; Lave & Wenger, 1991, 1998) was used as a means to facilitate transformative agency amongst homelessness practitioners (HP) in Finland. Sannino and colleagues found that DPL enabled HPs to recognize and elucidate conflicts, offer each other potential supportive resources, and establish essential connections, ultimately resulting in transformative action. Thus, HPs could cope with working life conditions amid conflict by using DPL to collectively solve problems through their CoP, transforming their professional agency in the process. Educating and empowering individuals to explore and develop their professional agency is a necessary response to the changing economy – made even more pressing because of the pandemic. Since universities and federal policy do not prioritize non-academic career preparation, post-doctoral research fellows (postdocs) may disregard the low likelihood of obtaining an academic job and lack relevant non-academic skills (Hayter & Parker, 2019). The ratio of Ph.D. holders to academic openings is far higher across most disciplines (Hancock, 2021). A recent study from the UK estimates that only 50% of Social Science and 45% of Arts and Humanities Ph.D. holders are in academic roles 3.5 years after graduation. PhDs and postdocs have faced, for at least 20 years, dwindling job prospects for tenure-track faculty employment (Hayter & Parker, 2019). Thus, there is a significant need to educate and empower recent PhDs and postdocs to develop professional agency beyond the academy.
Project page: https://alivelab.ca/project/beyond-the-academy/
Funded by:
-
Description: Social media enables identity expression, exploration, and experimentation; something innate to the human experience. Over the past two decades, the proliferation and use of online social networking in mainstream society has grown exponentially. In Canada, as of 2016, over 93% of the population is connected to the Internet with more than 60% using the social network site Facebook™; usage that is mirrored in both the United States and the United Kingdom (de Argaez, 2017). Research into the application of social networks such as Facebook™ within and across disciplines reflects this mainstream growth. For example, a search of the Web of Science database using the keyword “social network” reveals that the number of articles on the topic has increased 600% over the last decade. With the proliferation of social networks enabled by the Internet, understanding the influence of powerful others in the expression of individual agency is of critical importance – especially when it comes to the education and social support of vulnerable populations such as those with chronic diseases including heart failure. Heart failure (HF) is one of the most common chronic conditions and reasons for hospitalizations in the world. HF occurs after the heart becomes damaged or weakened by an underlying cause, for example a virus or heart attack, and is a chronic progressive disease with no known cure. As the majority of time patients spend is outside formal clinical contexts, there is an opportunity to research how social media affects the education and support individuals with HF seek. To date, the majority of literature in the chronic disease spectrum focuses on provider or institutionally-driven education and support communities (Toma et al., 2014) and there is very little research on the HF patient use of social media platforms for facilitating education and social support (Widmer et al., 2017)
Project page: https://alivelab.ca/project/unbundled-learning/
Funded by:
-
Description: The Assessment for Learning in Immersive Virtual Environments (ALIVE) project is a research program that examines how 3DIVEs enable student success through the provision of feedback while students are immersed in a real-world science inquiry investigation (See Figures 1 & 2), addressing one of SSHRCs future challenges by examining new ways of learning and identifying roles emerging and disruptive technologies play in learning for individuals. This project builds upon our previous research in immersive technologies for the summative assessment of science inquiry learning conducted at Harvard University (Code et al., 2011a, 2011b, 2011c, 2011d, 2012, 2013; Clarke-Midura et al., 2011a, 2011b, 2011c, 2011d, 2012a, 2012b) and our research in the areas of learner agency, self-efficacy, and self-regulated learning in video game environments (Code, 2010, 2013; Code & Zaparyniuk, 2010, 2011; Code & Zap, 2011, 2013, submitted; Zaparyniuk & Code, 2009; Zaparyniuk, 2007a, 2007b, 2015). This project will integrate and extend this work by exploring the use of 3DIVEs as a means to provide feedback through the formative assessment of inquiry reasoning in the context of middle school life science. Key research questions that will guide this two-year project investigates ways that the 3DIVE technology and log-file data, designed around a model of science inquiry, enables individual students to utilize feedback, and whether and how this affects their agency for learning (goal setting, motivation, self-regulation, and self-efficacy), and academic achievement.
Project page: https://alivelab.ca/project/alive-investigator/
Funded by:
PUBLICATIONS
