Exploring gender and gender pairing in the knowledge elaboration processes of students using computer-supported collaborative learning

Abstract

The aim of the study is to investigate the influence of gender and gender pairing on students' learning performances and knowledge elaboration processes in Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL). A sample of ninety-six secondary school students, participated in a two-week experiment. Students were randomly paired and asked to solve several moderately structured problems concerning Newtonian mechanics. Students' pretest and posttest performances were analyzed to see whether students' gender and the gender pairing (mixed or single-gender) were significant factors in their problem solving learning in CSCL. Students' online interactions were also analyzed to unravel the dynamic process of individual knowledge elaboration. The multilevel analyses revealed that a divergent pattern of knowledge elaboration was a significant predictor for students' learning achievement, and in mixed-gender dyads students' knowledge elaboration processes were more inclined to diverge from each other. Moreover, females in single-gender dyads significantly outperformed females in mixed-gender dyads. But this was not the case for male students.

Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning in STEM Domains: Towards a Meta-synthesis

“…Additionally, although higher-education computer-science students overwhelmingly tweeted constructive comments that encouraged class discussion, there were also examples of students tweeting unrelated comments [21]. Other potential drawbacks to "Mixed Synchronous" CSCL included the additional time communicating via chat took as compared to face-toface interactions [30] and the finding that mixedgender pairing may negatively affect secondary education female achievement in physics problem solving [10]. For example, female students placed in a mixed gender dyad performed relatively worse on a posttest than females in single gender dyads.…”

“…Three of these sampled papers quantitatively examined the effectiveness of particular tools with synchronous dyads in controlled settings [8,20,37]. An additional sampled paper used mixed methods to examined how gender pairings affected student's' knowledge elaboration processes and learning achievement [10]. In all four of these sampled papers, the authors found their CSCL tools to be particularly beneficial to student learning.…”

“…The use of these tools while engaged in synchronous CSCL driven by social constructivist pedagogies encouraged effective active participation whether that be through chat [10,29,30,37], tweeting [21], shared word processing and audio connection [8], adapted collaborative learning support (ACLS) [37], a semi-computerized inference tutoring tool [8], scripts [4] or a "game like" peer tutoring system [36].…”

“…Of the papers sampled in this cluster, there did not appear to be differences across K12 and higher education. These papers used a variety of pedagogies guided by social constructivist principles such as inquiry-based instruction [30], case based instruction [8], scaffolding [10,21,29,36,37], and computer simulation [4].…”

How Design Science Research Helps Improve Learning Efficiency in Online Conversations

“…Gender has been associated with online discussion message scores. For example, Ding, Bosker, and Harskamp (2011) found that females tend to raise more questions than males in order to open or elicit a discussion. Various studies have shown that GPA to be associated with knowledge gain scores (see Lee & Wu, 2013, for a meta-analyses), and, therefore, we included it as a demographic variable.…”