An Assessment of Idea Emergence in Subject-Matter Collaborative Learning

Abstract

Idea emergence is critical in learning as knowledge creation. Although recent advancements make it possible to detect emergent ideas and evaluate how students engage in knowledge creation in collaborative learning contexts, the relationship between the learning processes and final conceptual understanding has not been well-studied. One confounding factor is how much students engage in their study topic during collaboration. In this study, therefore, we propose a new procedure for evaluating idea emergence in the context of jigsaw instruction by combining a socio-semantic network analysis of discourse and a text-mining algorithm, "the term-frequency." This procedure was used to evaluate how high-school learners engaged in their social process of knowledge creation as well as how much they discuss their study topics, the human immune system. Results showed that the weight of priority on a study topic did not significantly differ in both high and low conceptual understanding groups, but high conceptual understanding groups were more engaged in sharing and discussing ideas in the early stage of their collaboration. It is suggested that students' recognition of the study topic was not different depending on the levels of their conceptual understanding in a well-structured collaborative learning context such as jigsaw instruction. However, what matters is how students discuss their ideas through collaborative discourse.

Examining Student Regulation of Collaborative, Computational, Problem-Solving Processes in Open-Ended Learning Environments

“…Specifically, there was a significant positive relationship between the frequency of SSR and the physics score (r= 0.68, p=0.007). Similar results were also reported by Oshima et al (2020) and our results confirm other findings on the important relations between collaborative metacognitive regulation (Winters & Alexander, 2011) and socially shared regulation (Järvelä et al, 2016) and learning performance. A plausible explanation is that students find it hard to solve the challenge tasks on their own, and this increases their awareness and need for socially shared regulation.…”

Learning Analytics for a New Epistemological Perspective of Learning

“…KBDeX has been used to examine discourses leading to different levels of learning outcomes. Oshima et al [23] examined knowledge-building discourse among groups of high school students learning the human immune system in a science classroom, analyzing the discourse data using KBDeX and calculating the term frequencies of subject-related words used in the discourse. Oshima et al found no significant differences in mean term frequencies of subject-related words across groups; however, the temporal trajectories of the total values of degree centrality of words were different between high and low learning outcome groups, with the trajectory of high learning outcome groups continuously increasing over time.…”