STEM Students’ Sensemaking of Instructional Technology After the COVID-19 Pandemic

The sudden transition to remote learning in response to the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in a significant increase in reliance on instructional technology, some unique to STEM disciplines. This violation of students’ expectations for the learning experience presented an additional crisis. Students had to react to the disruption without time to carefully consider how best to use new technologies for learning. In crises, sensemaking occurs retroactively; students made sense of new instructional technologies after they had navigated the crisis. They adopted new approaches to engaging with their courses based on what strategies seemed successful during the pandemic. In this article, we use sensemaking as a lens to explore the changes in students’ views of instructional technologies as a result of their experiences during the pandemic. We conducted focus groups with 31 undergraduate STEM students at a medium-sized public university in the southeastern US. We found that STEM students were initially overwhelmed with the amount of technology they were required to use in their courses, but that in the long term, they expect more technology after the pandemic, especially to facilitate flexibility in learning space and approach. While they found some new tools that seemed to support their learning, they also developed ineffective strategies (e.g., navigating e-textbooks to find key words rather than reading). The results of our study inform post-COVID best practices for incorporating instructional technology. Faculty should expect to have to teach students how to use technology rather than assuming they will learn naturally. Faculty will also need to consider that while technology affords some support for learning, it introduces opportunities for students to employ strategies that interfere with learning.