Year: 2005
Type: dissertation
Abstract: This study explored collaboration and its prerequisites in three different learning projects conducted in authentic classroom settings. The aim was to study how collaboration is manifested in students’ shared activities and especially what features in the learning context were enhancing or restricting successful collaboration. Furthermore, one general aim was to find methodological tools for studying the process of collaboration and its intertwined social, cognitive, and contextual aspects in students’ ongoing activities. All the studies concerned lower secondary education. In the first and second study the participants were one student group working on a science report writing assignment. In the third study the main focus was on studying interaction between the students of two schools participating in a history project on Imperialism through a roleplay in a web-based environment. The fourth study dealt with a student pair’s working on Cultural history project face-to-face at a computer and engaged in a web-based discussion. The data were collected by various means. In all of the studies students’ activity was videotaped, students’ were interviewed and they filled out questionnaires. In addition, in two of the studies the material produced in the web-based environment was collected. The general approach of this study was a case study approach, each of the three projects representing an individual case on a same theme; how collaboration is manifested in students’ activity. The main analysis method used in the studies can be called qualitative content analysis (Chi 1997). The interaction was systematically and extensively analysed according to categorisations that arose both from theoretical and empirical, data-based contents. Results showed that collaboration where students were engaged in cognitively highlevel construction of shared understanding was rare. Instead, the nature of interaction both in face-to-face and computer-mediated situations was mostly uncritical knowledge sharing, where the topic in question was not discussed very deeply. Even though the study was looking for cognitively productive interaction, it became clear in all of the studies that the context for productive interaction presupposed ‘productivity’ also at the social and emotional level. It presupposed mutual and equal (symmetrical) involvement and engagement to construct shared understanding. Collaboration also presupposed a positive atmosphere for enabling engagement and for creating a safe environment for ‘productive’ conflicts and disagreement. All the studies demonstrated that shared knowledge construction typically occurred in situations where students had a clear task assignment and where the task itself triggered reasoning. In addition to task nature, the level of structuring students’ activities seemed to have an effect on the quality of students’ interaction. Students were able to better engage in working and constructing shared knowledge when the task was clear and well defined, whereas too general tasks made the engagement and orientation to the task difficult. Another essential feature influencing the nature of interaction was students’ interpersonal relations. Interaction between friends was more collaborative than between non-friends. It seemed that in the context of close relationship students were able to communicate more openly with each other. Another social issue studied was the symmetry of students’ knowledge-based roles in the activity. Students’ symmetrical relations changed depending on the other influential social and contextual factors in the situation. In two of the projects, a technology-based environment was used as a part of the learning activities. In both of these projects technology was used mostly for interaction between participants. Partly because of lacking structuring or guidance by the teacher or by the technological application, students’ web-based interaction remained superficial and aimless and was obviously motivated more by personal entertainment than by the school task itself. The value of technology in these two projects seemed to be more in entertaining students than in supporting collaboration. Altogether, the results of these studies suggest that there is not any single factor that could be pointed out as the reason for successful or unsuccessful collaboration in school contexts. Rather, it is a sum of many intertwined cognitive, social, emotional and contextual features involved in the specific situations. In the area of collaboration there is a need for more process-oriented research that reveals not only the core process of collaboration, as such, but also those features in the learning context that support or hinder it. Process-oriented research of collaboration is needed to capture the situational dynamics of learning together and thereby shed light on collaborative knowledge construction as a temporally evolving context-bound phenomenon.
Author: Maarit Arvaja
Language: English
Subfield: Developmental and Educational Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2218231000