NSF Awards: 1319445
This video describes how we took an NSF funded prototype called CREATE and expanded it to a multi-user university wide system. The system was designed to help students develop their ability to manage collaborative discourse and initial studies have shown that it holds promise as a tool to help students understand and improve collaborative sense-making processes. We show the prototype and the new multi-user system, discuss the system scaling process, and considerations for professional development. It concludes by pointing out what students think of the system and how it is meeting their needs.
Marcela Borge
Assistant Professor
One of the ways ewe are considering broadening the scope of this work is by using the system with younger students in middle school. What do you think would be some potential benefits and challenges to using this system with younger students?
Julia Plummer
Hi Marcela! Middle school students could certainly benefit from a system that would support their thinking as they make sense of new phenomena. I am also thinking about how such a system could support their teachers who might need help in putting these kind of structures in place in their classroom, if they are not comfortable facilitating such work in other ways even when they know they want this kind of collaboration and analysis to happen. At the same time, such an online environment might need support for the middle school teacher to know whether their students' work is productive.
Marcela Borge
Marcela Borge
Assistant Professor
What kind of support?
Daniel Damelin
Senior Scientist
How often do students reflect on their discussions?
What challenges do you encounter in students' self-reflection ratings on their discourse and their actual proficiencies?
Marcela Borge
Assistant Professor
Hi Daniel,
The amount of reflections vary by instructors and courses. Some have had students reflect 5 times- having five discussions with reflections, one every two weeks over 10 weeks. Other instructors have two-three discussions as a way to synthesize course concepts at critical points in the course. One instructor has only used the discussion and reflection once, as a way to introduce students to important aspects of collaboration.
Carrie Willis
Technology Director and Teacher
It is so important for students to take time to reflect on their work and make connections. This definitely has a place in all classrooms, even as young as elementary school. Do you require reflections on all assignments?
Marcela Borge
Assistant Professor
Hi Carrie,
The system is set up such that there is a reflection tab for each chat space, but whether or not it is required is completely up to the teacher. The teacher can also modify what students reflect on by revising what is there, choosing which items to reflect on, or adding new items.
Jim Hammerman
Co-Director
Learning how to collaborate well is an important goal for education, and the suggestions your system provides seem like they would be helpful. I'm curious, though, what research have you conducted about the effectiveness of this system in improving collaboration? It seems that the data about skills and effectiveness of collaboration comes solely from students' self-report ratings, or are there other sources of data? I'd be especially interested in how you measure changes in students' collaborative skills and dispositions.
Marcela Borge
Assistant Professor
Hi Jim, we conducted a study in a real classroom with 13 teams and then tracked the quality of their communication processes over time. We found significant improvement in the quality of their conversations about course concepts, particularly with regard to discussing alternative perspectives and quality of claims. I include a link below to the article. We also found that the students actually worked to make sense of their discussion processes to try to understand them and figure out how to improve. We have another study that will be sent out in a month that repeats the study, but this time with far less instructor feedback... no spoilers here on how that turned out. We have also been piloting studies with faculty across different departments. One really interesting context we are currently working with is a cultural psychology course that talks about issues of race and gender. We are interested in seeing whether these types of emotionally latent conversations can also be improved.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11412-018-9270-5
James Diamond
Research Scientist
Hi Marcela,
this is really fascinating. I'm especially intrigued by the suggestions for collaborative strategies that are provided to students (based on each team's self-reports, right?) Have you thought about the implications of this work for social media? I think it would be interesting to consider using a similar format (and maybe you or someone else already is) in spaces like Facebook or even Twitter, to help people engage one another more generatively.
Thanks for sharing your work!
Marcela Borge
Assistant Professor
Great question! We actually have attempted to examine an aspect of this for social media, but have yet to adapt the study for that sole purpose. Nonetheless, what we have found so far is that providing models of competence for how to behave in social media contexts (in learning settings) combined with reflection about ongoing activity in that setting can result in high quality social media conversations centered around course concepts- even when instructor presence fades. However, I think it would be very interesting to modify the reflective criterial in CREATE to help young students develop social media competencies- and that is very doable with the flexibility of the system.
Further posting is closed as the showcase has ended.