We didn’t really examin cultural or linguistic factors as a research focus even though our participants are CLD students. We can clearly see the variety of students’ trajectories (and their artifacts) based on their prior knowledge, interests, and experiences though. Aligning with previous research, we found multimodal composing offered multiple points of entry for students to work with modes, tools, and content in individualized ways.

First of all, we haven't moved to the next level to have other teachers run our program yet - the research team has been providing the instruction. For us, one goal is to help students further develop their own strenghs (identity), and at the same time, develop appreciation of areas they are not good at or not interested in. 

The first question you are asking is a challenging one (both in practice and in research); to a certain degree, it's about how one integrates Arts with STEM in a STEAM program. One thing that we've developed more nuanced understanding is that whereas there're many differences between supports needed for nurturing students' creativity/imagination and theirsceince understanding, there's also a great deal of overlap. The two could support each other. For example, quality imagination also attends to, among other things, details and consistency, which are also criteria for high level scientific understanding. Come to our poster if plan to attend CSCL. We'd love to hear more of your feedback.

Kolovou, M., Shen, J., & Smith, B.E. (2019, June). Imagination in adolescents’ collaborative multimodal science fictions. Proceedings of the 13th International Conference of Computer Supported Collaborated Learning, Lyon, France.

In theory, it could be done individually. But we have always run it so that students work in groups on their final projects (multimodal science fictions). For one, it emulates real life scenarios (e.g., how a movie is made by a large team) and we expect students to learn how to collaborate with others. Second, we envision individual students learning different things and further develop different expertise in our program (note that we do have activities that everyone has to do such as Scracth tutorial).

We have tried different mechanisms to form groups (e.g., students form the groups organically based on their preferences/choices of the roles; see Jiang, Shen, Smith, 2019; Jiang, Smith, Shen, 2019); in more recent runs, we've tried grouping students first and then let them figure out the roles within each group. Of course, different grouping method will lead to different learning experience and each has pros and cons. Despite the formation mechanism, we do constantly encourage students to swtich roles/try out different roles to see different perspectives. 

Jiang, S., Smith, B. E., & Shen, J. (2019). Examining How Different Modes Mediate Adolescents’ Interactions during Digital Multimodal Composing Processes. Interactive Learning Environments. Online First.

Jiang, S., Shen, J., & Smith, B.E. (2019). Designing Discipline-specific Roles for Interdisciplinary Learning: Two Comparative Cases in an Afterschool STEM+L Program. International Journal of Science Education. Online First.