The role of collaborative interactions versus individual construction on students’ learning of engineering concepts

ABSTRACT

This study primarily investigated the role of interactional factors in an unstructured face-to-face collaborative learning environment with challenging engineering activities. We explored dialogue patterns in terms of quality of interaction, students’ scaffolding instances, and discourse moves for productive interactions of collaborative dyads in the context of the Interactive-Constructive-Active-Passive (ICAP) framework. The sample included 72 engineering students for the interactive and constructive conditions. Students’ understanding of material science and engineering concepts were measured using pre and posttest design. Results showed students in the interactive condition performed significantly better than students in the constructive condition. Verbal analysis of approximately 12 hours video recordings and 210 pages of transcriptions for students’ dialogue in the interactive condition indicated a strong relation between the quality of interaction, scaffolding instances, and individual learning gains. In addition, a verbal analysis examining each utterance based on the discourse moves revealed that the certain moves are significantly linked with learning outcomes.

KEYWORDS:

• Engineering education research
• teamwork
• assessment of learning outcomes
• active learning
• peer learning/teaching

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Muhsin Menekse is an Assistant Professor at Purdue University with a joint appointment in the School of Engineering Education and the Department of Curriculum & Instruction. Dr. Menekse’s primary research investigates how classroom activities affect conceptual understanding in engineering and science for all students. His second research focus is on verbal interactions that can enhance productive discussions in collaborative learning settings. And his third research focus is on metacognition and its implications for learning. Much of this research focuses on learning processes in classroom settings. Dr. Menekse is the recipient of the 2014 William Elgin Wickenden Award by the American Society for Engineering Education.

Michelene T. H. Chi is Foundation Professor and the Dorothy Bray Endowed Professor of Science and Teaching in the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College at Arizona State University. A cognitive and learning science researcher, Dr. Chi’s overall approach to understanding how students learn is student-centered. She has developed the ICAP theory, focusing on what active learning activities students can do to engage that can lead to improved learning. She also has developed a theory of collective causality to explain why students have robust misconceptions and how they might be remove them. Chi has published over 125 papers and her work has been cited over 50,000 times. Dr. Chi was elected into the National Academy of Education in 2010, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2016. She received the Distinguished Contributions to Research in Education Award from the American Educational Research Association on 2016, and the David E. Rumelhart Prize from the Cognitive Science Society in 2018.

ORCID

Muhsin Menekse http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5547-5455

Additional information

Funding

This material is based upon work supported by the USA National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0935235.