Monitoring makes a difference: quality and temporal variation in teacher education students’ collaborative learning

ABSTRACT

The aim of this process-oriented video-observation study is to explore how groups that perform differently differ in terms of the number, quality, and temporal variation of their content-level (knowledge co-construction) and meta-level (monitoring) activities. Five groups of teacher education students (n = 22) were observed throughout a 3-month course. Video recordings (33 hours) of face-to-face group interaction (n = 12,931 speech turns) and pre- and post-tests of students’ knowledge were collected. The results show that the well-performing group was more engaged in high-level knowledge co-construction and monitoring activities. The well-performing group was also capable of maintaining a higher level throughout the tasks, whereas the lower performing groups’ knowledge co-construction and monitoring activities was reduced during the course.

KEYWORDS:

• knowledge co-construction
• monitoring
• process-orientation
• teacher education
• video data

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Research Council of Cultural and Social Science Research, Academy of Finland [grant numbers 107667 and 201759].