Case Study Number 8: Student Voice, Deep Learning and Student Agency

Student agency in assessment is evident when students make assessment choices, and their voices inform decisions. This paper presents an in-depth case study of a high performing school that sought student voice to reform its assessment culture to enhance student agency. Secondary students in an Australian school were invited to draw a visual metaphor: if assessment were a food, what would it be? Responses were analysed to identify: What can be learnt about assessment culture from students’ drawings and comments? And how did student voice inform changes in school assessment practices and assessment culture? Six years later, the student ideas were revisited by a school leader to identify how cultural and structural conditions for student agency within the assessment culture had changed. Using visual methodologies with students provided insightful commentary on how assessment practices may be modified to support learning and the challenges of engaging in assessment culture reform.

Calls for educators to promote student voice and agency in classrooms often overlook the importance of the policy milieu in which teaching and learning is performed. In this article we interrogate the constitution of student, teacher and researcher subjectivities within student voice research. Working with Stephen Ball’s neoliberal technologies of reform (technologies of the market and performativity (including technologies of the self); implemented through acculturation), we take up the notion that those of us working in education are complicit in the reforms we work to disrupt and conceptualise research as a technology of reform. We analyse performativity mechanisms at play in our student voice research that produced students, teachers and researchers as neoliberal policy subjects even whilst working toward the democratic intent of student voice. We contribute a heuristic with which scholars and educators can interrogate technologies of reform at work in their student voice work.

The purpose of this article is to discuss student voice as a meaningful pedagogical practice in elementary physical education to promote student agency and learning. Four questions are answered: What is student voice? How can authentic student voice be accessed? How and where might student voice be enacted in practice? And, how can student voice be listened and responded to inform our practice? Scaffolded strategies that can be implemented in practice, over time, to build the capacity of students to genuinely express their voice as well as the capacity of teachers to genuinely access and enact student voice to impact practice and student outcomes are suggested.

This paper explores the lived experiences of a diverse student cohort enrolled in a master’s degree educational-leadership program. The program’s global focus was on the quality of teacher education, prospective teachers’ workplace preparedness and leaders in the workforce in higher education. Internationalization, real-life experiences and student voice served as an enacted intervention curriculum for an educational leadership course designed to reveal the gap between theory and practice. An epistemological diversity lens stimulated critical reflection on students’ participation in the course design and its connection to realities in the field. Diverse higher-education classrooms pose specific challenges for educational leadership programs in including effective internationalization, workplace relevance and improving the generalizability and content validity of the educational leadership course. This small qualitative exploratory investigation provides an in-depth understanding of the value of student voice in informing course and program design. Interviews, observations, two surveys and a document analysis triangulated the data and provided information on the complexities in higher-education classrooms. The findings focus on teacher-educators and higher-education classroom management as well as on the value of critical inquiry, reflection and intervention for existing course designs and transformation.

STEM culture has consistently been characterized as exclusionary of a diversity of student identities, experiences, and voices. Through such exclusive and inequitable practices, STEM education dehumanizes. A growing body of scholarship documents ways in which student-faculty pedagogical partnership can support the creation of more equitable and inclusive practices. The research question we addressed is: How do faculty and student partners experience, perceive, and act on the potential of student-faculty pedagogical partnership to humanize STEM education? Combining aspects of a scoping review and reflexive thematic analysis, we analyzed 32 publications focused on pedagogical partnership in STEM in the arenas of learning, teaching, and assessment or curriculum design and pedagogic consultancy with student partners in the liminal role of pedagogical co-designer or consultant. Our review, informed by the experiences as well as the perspectives of the student co-authors, revealed five key findings about the aspects of pedagogical partnerships that contribute to humanizing STEM education. First, pedagogical partnerships give faculty access to students’ perspectives and humanity. Second, they support faculty in being, and being perceived as, more fully human. Third, they provide dedicated space and time to develop equitable approaches. Fourth, they support the enactment of equitable teaching. Fifth, they foster a sense of mattering, belonging, and agency in students. Drawing on these findings, we develop four recommendations for those interested in embracing partnership to humanize STEM education. The first is to create roles and support structures for facilitating genuine engagement across positions and perspectives. The second is to position underrepresented student partners to effect a culture shift. The third is to embrace non-STEM student partners’ contributions to humanizing STEM education. The fourth is to recognize this work as ongoing. Together, these findings and recommendations address calls to contribute to renewed and sustained attention to student experiences in relation to instructor values, dispositions, and positionalities. In addition, they reject harmful ideologies and practices that exclude a spectrum of identities, viewpoints, and values. Finally, they contribute to the creation of context-sensitive, inclusive, equitable, and empowering educational experiences for all students.

Background. Despite the global success of Project-Based Learning (PBL), its adaptation within Chinese writing education remains underexplored. The localization of the Gold Standard PBL (GSPBL) framework presents unique cultural and institutional challenges that shape how its principles are interpreted and implemented in classroom practice. Purpose. This study aims to reveal the “task-oriented” simplification mechanism underlying the localization of GSPBL in Chinese writing education and to explain how constructivist learning principles are transformed through regulatory and cultural recontextualization processes. Materials and Methods. Guided by constructivist learning theory, this study adopts an interpretive qualitative design. Through comparative document analysis and a multi-layered framework evolution diagram, the study systematically examines the transformation of seven core GSPBL elements—Challenging Problem, Sustained Inquiry, Authenticity, Student Voice and Choice, Reflection, Critique and Revision, and Public Product—across national policy texts, writing textbooks, and lesson plans. Seven exploratory propositions guide a systematic content analysis of 3,412 meaning units. Results. The findings show that two elements (Challenging Problem and Reflection) are completely absent, one element (Authenticity) is replaced by classroom simulations, and the remaining four elements (Sustained Inquiry, Student Voice and Choice, Critique and Revision, and Public Product) are significantly weakened. Collectively, these transformations form a task-oriented PBL model characterized by controllability, evaluability, and teacher-centeredness. The multi-layered evolutionary path reveals a regulatory recontextualization process involving surface proceduralization, mid-level exam-oriented adaptation, and deep-level cultural substitution, where collectivism and behaviorism replace constructivist underpinnings. Conclusion. Theoretically, this study extends the framework of cross-cultural educational transfer by constructing a typology of element transformation and a stratified mechanism model. Practically, it proposes reform pathways to reconstruct multi-draft revision cycles, connect with authentic audiences, enhance student autonomy, and integrate process-oriented assessment. These pathways aim to restore the meaning-making essence of PBL and promote a paradigmatic shift in Chinese writing instruction from “task completion” to “deep learning.”

During the COVID-19 pandemic, online learning became the predominant mode of learning for 33 to 54% of students in Canada’s three largest school boards. As inclusive practices continue to grow and online learning is now part of the Ontario curriculum, educators need guidance on how to support K-12 students with diverse learning needs in online and inclusive classrooms. This case study attends to the voice of elementary and high-school students, with and without disabilities who shared their experiences of online learning during the pandemic. It explored the impacts of integrating multiple methods of instruction, assessment, and technology to accommodate diverse learning needs. Results indicated that limited opportunity for connections and lack of structure and guidance were key factors that impacted the students’ motivation and ability to learn in the online environment, and age was a determining factor in technology use preferences.

This chapter reports on a follow-up study to the case studies reported in Chaps. 2, 3, and 4. As a result of the positive student feedback in the six case studies presented earlier, I decided to extend my research and investigate whether the student voice on teaching and learning in small classes might act as a trigger for teachers’ reflection and classroom practice. I wanted to see if it was possible to broker dialogue between teachers and students to co-construct appropriate pedagogy in small classes. I start the chapter by showing how the study builds on previous research that has succeeded in using the student voice as a prompt for teacher reflection on curriculum innovation. I then describe how I elicited the student voice on teaching and learning in their respective classes (all schools, students and teachers were different from those in my earlier case studies) and collated their suggestions for improving teaching and learning in their respective contexts. Students’ feedback on how to improve teaching and learning processes included some intriguing suggestions including their perceived need for more time to work on tasks in class, their belief that teachers needed to reduce the amount of teacher talk, their preference for more varied group work in class and better use of classroom space. Students also sought a wider variety of language tasks and more chances to engage in peer assessment practices. After triangulating interview data with classroom observations, teachers were provided with student interview transcripts and I elicited their reaction to the students’ feedback in interviews. Further observations were arranged to determine whether teachers could incorporate suggested changes into their teaching and I conclude this chapter by demonstrating how the student voice acted as a catalyst for teachers’ professional development.

Following the significant influx of refugee students into Poland after 2022, the education and communication strategies for migrant-background pupils have gained critical importance. Framed as a response to their specific needs and an expression of respect for children’s rights, these practices require urgent scholarly attention. This article identifies a salient research gap at the intersection of migration studies, language acquisition, trauma-informed pedagogy, and special educational needs (SEN) provision in practical educational settings. The authors formulate two central research questions: First, how can school-based communication foster genuine inclusion and intercultural dialogue, rather than enforcing assimilation? Second, in what ways can educational practices effectively amplify the agency and voice of refugee students? By addressing these questions, the paper aims to contribute to the development of more equitable and responsive educational frameworks for a diversifying student population in Polish schools.

The essence of independent Playing in the context of early childhood education is to provide meaningful play experiences so that they get the opportunity to explore their environment, solve problems, and become leaders in the learning process. One of the efforts to realize the freedom of play is to develop student agency in the child. Student agency is a child's competence to determine his learning process through expressing ideas and opinions, making choices, and making decisions to create a sense of ownership for what he does. This study aims to analyze the development of student agency which is packaged in a school program, namely the Aksi Pasukan HEPI at the TK Negeri Pembina, Subang Regency. The research method used is qualitative with a case study approach, with data collection being observation, interviews, and documentation. The result of the research is that the Aksi Pasukan HEPI program can develop early childhood student agency, by empowering all assets owned by the school and its environment.

Deep BBN Learning for Health Assessment toward Decision-Making on Structures under Uncertainties

Recent emergence of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) technology has stimulated interests as well as concerns in their potential in teaching and learning. Situated in the new and transforming context, this study provides an avenue for students to introspectively explore their use of GenAI in a postgraduate course. Seventy-four students from three Chinese universities participated in this study. By analyzing student interviews conducted pre- and post-course, alongside their chat logs with GenAI and reflective journal entries detailing their learning approaches, the research uncovers a spectrum of student perspectives on GenAI’s impact, ranging from beneficial optimism, to cautious skepticism and adaptable pragmatism. Notably, student agency is identified as a crucial element in relation to these themes. This was articulated in four types of learning activities: receptive, resistive, resourceful, and reflective. The research underscores the importance of supporting and empowering student agency in the learning approaches aided by GenAI in education, highlighting its role in optimizing its use and enhancing autonomous, lifelong learning skills amidst the evolving technologically advanced learning landscape.

Learner agency is often seen unproblematically as an integral aspect of ‘twenty-first century lifelong learning’. Agency and instrumentalist forms of teacher professional development are problematised through this qualitative case study that explores a teacher’s inquiry into assessment for learning practices. This article illustrates how Teaching as Inquiry can be located as either a process that is purely technicist or replete with potential for teachers to engage with ‘unwelcome truths’. Student voice data that reveal ‘unwelcome truths’ can provide a catalyst for teacher reflection on student positioning in learning relationships. Findings focus on practices of assessment for learning, assessment literacy, agency as a neoliberal construction and the need to interrogate power relations in the classroom for student agency to flourish. Issues around student voice and the democratic participation of students in schooling improvement are discussed. Teaching as Inquiry, that explicitly targets wider non-instrumental goals associated with teacher learning, can be a critical process that addresses the growth of assessment literacy and learner agency in classrooms. It can transcend a linear obsession with easily measured quantifiable shifts in student achievement data.

Student voice and youth citizenship participation programmes in school at times rest upon simplistic and naive assumptions of the hierarchies of power that are embedded in regulated spaces. Such assumptions can also result from the prevailing models of youth participation that often rely on oppositional notions of power between students and adults. In this chapter, we critique these positions by interrogating the exchanges of power between secondary school students and teachers during the implementation of a participatory social studies curriculum project in which students took ‘personal social action’ for assessment credits. Drawing on research with five schools in Aotearoa New Zealand involving classroom observations, student focus group interviews (n = 93), teacher interviews and collaborative research, we share two case studies which explore the influence students or teachers had on controlling the social action process. Our findings illustrate a highly dynamic and intergenerational process in which the locus of power continually moved between adults and students during the course of the social action process. The need for complex understandings of power-sharing is required if young people are to participate in student voice and citizenship action in the context of highly regulated school spaces.

Design automation is undergoing a new generation of changes caused by artificial intelligence technologies represented by deep learning and reinforcement learning. Notably, the advantages of deep reinforcement learning in addressing solution optimisation and decision-making tasks with cognitive automation functionality have garnered attention in design. In the context of surrogate model-driven engineering design optimisation, this paper addresses current research challenges such as reliance on domain knowledge for local development, shortcomings in the self-learning and adaptive capabilities of optimisation algorithms for global exploration, etc. Centred around the deep reinforcement learning model, Deep Q-learning, and complemented by self-organising maps and neural network technologies, we propose a methodology considering multi-fidelity simulation data for design space exploration. This approach effectively reduces sampling costs and enables the optimisation model to learn the optimal direction for high-precision predictions and achieve rapid, accurate optimisation. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed method is comprehensively validated through four typical optimisation scenarios and a case study involving the optimisation of a wheeled robot's suspension swing arm structure. This work will be a crucial reference for applying deep reinforcement learning in simulation-driven engineering design optimisation.