Developing an Observation Protocol for Cooperative Learning
Authors: Hongxuan Chen, Geoffrey Herman, Morgan Fong, Liia Butler
Source: 2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition
URL: https://peer.asee.org/40991
Abstract
This work-in-progress aims to develop methods for studying cooperative learning. Use of structured roles to facilitate cooperative learning is an evidence-based practice that has been shown to be beneficial. In computer science (CS), Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning (POGIL) and pair programming are common implementations of structured roles. The combination of structured roles and activities also helps build students’ process skills including communication and metacognition. The benefits of implementing structured role-based cooperation include scalability to large classroom sizes, decreased attrition and failure rates, and positive student perception. While these benefits have been shown in a variety of disciplines, most prior work has focused on in-person, synchronous settings, and few studies have looked at online, synchronous settings. With the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, instructors around the world have had to shift their teaching strategies online, thus we need a better understanding of how cooperative learning takes place online. This work-in-progress serves to document our development of a mixed-methods approach to capture how students work together during online, POGIL-inspired activities. We used a concurrent mixed-methods approach to create an observation protocol that bridges the strengths between purely qualitative and purely quantitative methods. Purely quantitative data sources, such as student survey data, can quickly give general trends and themes of how students perceive cooperative learning and how cooperative learning may have impacted student achievement. However, these insights come at the cost of detail and specificity. On the other hand, purely qualitative data sources, such as video recordings of groups and ethnographic observations, give incredible depth and insight into how a group works together and how that process evolves over time. However, this comes at the cost of extensive time to analyze data and loss of generality. To develop our observation protocol, a team of three graduate student researchers visited three different CS courses during the Spring 2021 semester. These courses were technical, core courses with large enrollments (~400 students each), and all three were offered at the same large, public research university. Each course used a flipped classroom design: students would watch pre-class videos, then attend online, synchronous class sessions via Zoom to work with their groups on a POGIL-inspired activity. Groups worked separately in their own Zoom breakout rooms with access to instructor help via an online queue. 77 audio and screen recordings were collected across the three courses. The team is currently in the process of validating the coding scheme by performing interrater reliability checks using a subset of the videos. In this work-in-progress, we present preliminary findings related to the kinds of contributions students make, general participation trends, moments of team bonding, and help-seeking patterns. Finally, we discuss future directions for use of our coding scheme as well as implications on implementing structured role-based cooperative learning online in the future.
Metadata
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| author | Morgan Fong, Hongxuan Chen, Geoffrey Herman, and Liia Butler |
| booktitle | 2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition |
| title | Developing an Observation Protocol for Cooperative Learning |
| year | 2022 |
| address | Minneapolis, MN |
| month | August |
| number | 10.18260/1-2–40991 |
| publisher | ASEE Conferences |
| url | https://peer.asee.org/… |