Year: 2022
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Research on roles in collaborative learning has concentrated mainly on roles that are prescribed for students while only limited attention has been devoted to roles that emerge naturally during collaboration. To address this gap, this thesis adopted a situative approach to study the functional participatory roles that emerge spontaneously and are self-enacted by students during collaborative learning and examined the significance of such roles in collaborative learning. Three datasets on students collaborating on inquiry-based science activities in small groups made up the data for the thesis. The role analyses were based on systematic video-observations, including a detailed analysis of emergent roles from videotaped group activities and a subsequent hierarchical cluster analysis to identify student role profiles. These analyses were consolidated further with an in-depth qualitative approach. The thesis consists of three studies. Study I investigated the emergence of functional participatory roles in a computer-supported science inquiry and developed an analytical coding scheme for their analysis. Fine-grained analysis of the video data identified 17 distinct functional participatory roles self-enacted by the students and provided empirical support for the spontaneous, interactive, and dynamically evolving nature of roles in collaborative learning. Study II developed a scalable framework for analysing these emergent roles across a range of collaborative science learning environments. This flexible framework distinguishes between the core roles that resemble each other across different science learning settings and activity-specific roles that are unique to a particular context. Finally, Study III examined the relationships between group achievement and within-group configurations of role profiles. The results revealed striking differences in role configuration between higher- and lower-achieving groups. Taken together, this thesis extend existing understanding of spontaneously self-enacted roles and their significance in collaborative science learning and consolidate methodology in this area.
Source: UTUPub (University of Turku)
Author: Heinimäki, Olli-Pekka
Language: English
Subfield: Developmental and Educational Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7038148830