Group Interaction Styles and Students' Individual and Group Cognition: A Mixed-Methods Investigation

• In Event: 69.043 - Social Interaction and Authentic Learning Mediated Through Technology

Abstract

This presentation reports a mixed-methods study about group interaction styles in team blogging on students’ individual knowledge construction and group cognition as demonstrated by tagclouds. Thirty-six students were randomly assigned into eight groups and blogged for five weeks. Four groups were randomly selected to respond to the first blog post each week whereas the rest four groups contributed to the teamblogs freely without the requirement of comments. Data analyses included correlating students’ individual and group rankings (as demonstrated in their team’s tagclouds) of concepts with the instructor’s ranking, content analysis of the blog posts, and thematic coding of participants’ and instructor interviews. Results revealed that the relatively intense group interactions on teamblogs promoted individual learning due to several factors.

Authors

• Ying Xie, Northern Illinois University

• Shu-yuan Lin, Idaho State University