Group Cognition - A Research Agenda

A Research Agenda

The Virtual Math Teams (VMT) research group at Drexel University has developed a methodology for chat analysis that is tuned to the exploration of group cognition in a chat environment. This approach is inspired by ethnomethodologically-informed conversation analysis, but the domain differs in multiple significant ways from that of most conversation analysis: Chat is online so neither the participants nor their production of utterances is visible; interactions are text-based so they lack intonation, personality, accent; the topics are math problem solving, rather than socializing; the participants are primarily teenage students engaged in learning, not adult domain experts; the groups are usually 3 to 5 instead of dyads; the participants generally do not know each other or know much about each other; etc. The chat analysis looks closely, line-by-line, at how postings build upon each other sequentially; how they respond to previous postings and elicit future ones; how they establish the social order of the group interaction; how they repair problems of co-construction of shared group meanings; how they construct, reference, remember and name resources that they use in their meaning making.

The research goal is to understand how students interact in an online environment like VMT. How do they approach a given problem and make use of the affordances of their technology? How do different technical details change or mediate the interactions and the methods that students develop? Such understanding can guide the design of CSCL systems and help to attain the frustratingly elusive vision of globally networked collaborative learning.

The research began by looking at details of how interaction moves are accomplished in brief episodes of case studies. Interaction is tightly embedded in its unique circumstances, which cannot be experimentally manipulated or simplistically generalized. Collections of case studies of a particular kind of interaction can deepen one’s sense of how people engage in such interactions. This may lead to targeted hypotheses that can be explored by quasi-experimental investigations, ethnographic observation or structured interviews. As CSCL researchers share their analyses, the community will gradually develop the expertise and conceptualizations needed to guide system design and pedagogical intervention.

The VMT research team is exploring through the use of chat analysis and other empirical methodologies such topics as: group cognition, group meaning making, the self-constitution of small groups, the nature of online co-presence, group agency, virtual deixis, the adoption of the VMT system, the virtual co-construction of math objects, bridging online discontinuities, negotiation of meaning and online group information behavior. Analyses are developed collaboratively in weekly data sessions, as well as in international workshops where findings are shared with researchers who are using the VMT environment at other institutions