Are we together or not? The temporal interplay of monitoring, physiological arousal and physiological synchrony during a collaborative exam

Abstract

The coordination of cognitive and non-cognitive interactive processes contributes to successful collaboration in groups, but it is hard to evidence in computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL). Monitoring is a metacognitive process that can be an indicator of a student's ability to recognize success or failure in collaboration. This study focuses on how monitoring occurs in CSCL during a collaborative exam situation by examining how individual student contributions to monitoring processes are related to physiological synchrony and physiological arousal in groups. The participants were organized in four groups of three members each, and they wore sensors that measured their physiological activity. The data consist of video recordings from collaborative exam sessions lasting 90 minutes and physiological data captured from each student with Empatica 4.0 sensors. The video data were analyzed using qualitative content analysis to identify monitoring events. Students' physiological arousal was determined through peak detection, and physiological concordance was used as an index for the students' physiological synchrony. The individual and group level analysis investigated arousal and physiological synchrony in concordance with monitoring during the collaborative exam. The results showed that, in each group, each student contributed to joint monitoring. In addition, the monitoring activities exhibited a significant correlation with the arousal, indicating that monitoring events are reflected in physiological arousal. Physiological synchrony occurred within two groups, which experienced difficulties during the collaborative exam, whereas the two groups who had no physiological synchrony did not experience difficulties. It is concluded that physiological synchrony may be a new indicator for recognizing meaningful events in CSCL

Revealing the hidden structure of physiological states during metacognitive monitoring in collaborative learning

“…Thus, the amplitude of the peaks was mostly low (mean peak value: 0.19, f = 24,499). This result is in line with earlier studies in authentic learning situations showing low SCR amplitude (Malmberg, Haataja, et al, 2019; Malmberg, Järvelä, et al, 2019; Pijeira‐Díaz et al, 2018). However, even low EDA peak reactivity can signal the need for deliberate monitoring, such as the feeling of knowing (Morris et al, 2008) or errors made during a task (Hajcak et al, 2003), as it reflects a physiological response to external stimuli.…”

“…Due to the limitations of self‐report data, metacognition and especially monitoring events are often investigated by using observable traces that are viable for capturing monitoring events as they occur in a learning situation. These methods include, for example, think aloud protocols (Azevedo et al, 2011), video observations (Rogat & Linnebrink‐Garcia, 2011), computer logs (Malmberg et al, 2014), eye tracking (Taub et al, 2017) or physiological data (Haataja et al, 2018; Malmberg, Haataja, et al, 2019; Malmberg, Järvelä, et al, 2019). However, due to the implicit nature of metacognitive monitoring, many of the monitoring events remain unseen.…”

Experiencing CSCL: from motivation to the embodied experience and beyond

“…The paper also continues the discussion we have started in the journal earlier: How physiological measures can contribute to understanding about productive collaborative learning interactions and how physiological synchrony relates to collaborative learning (e.g. Malmberg et al 2019). Schneiner and colleagues' data come from 42 pairs of participants (N = 84) who worked on programming a robot to solve a variety of mazes.…”

What If We Look at the Body? An Embodied Perspective of Collaborative Learning

“…Furthermore, synchronicity is also found in less visible bodily reactions, such as physiological states (i.e., skin arousal measured by electrodermal activity from an individual's wrist). Talking specifically about collaborative situations in small groups, studies have suggested that students tend to synchronize their physiological states during interactions, particularly when monitoring one another's behaviors and cognition (Haataja et al, 2018;Malmberg et al, 2019), and have been able to show initial positive correlations between physiological synchrony and collaboration quality, task performance, and learning gains, by computing the number of cycles between low and high synchronization (Schneider et al, 2020). The aim of these studies was to explore how students monitor behavioral, cognitive, and affective processes during collaboration.…”