A Descriptive Study of Telementoring Among Students, Subject Matter Experts, and Teachers

Abstract

This descriptive study of the online communications of 10 teams of SMEs, classroom teachers, and K–12 students focused on the functions, frequency, and flow of e-mail messages exchanged in the context of curriculum-based projects. All correspondence among team members was automatically logged and then analyzed over time. Categories for message function were based on a previously published taxonomy but emerged as data analysis progressed into 21 specific classifications. Results indicated that: (1) SMEs and teachers “talked” more online, respectively, than students, even though students’ inquiry was the focus of each online project; (2) participants’ roles as expert, teacher, or student were associated with greater and lesser frequencies of certain message function types; (3) requests or reports directly related to curriculum content comprised a surprisingly small portion of total message functions identified; and (4) when viewed longitudinally, “reporting” and “requesting” functions followed very different frequency patterns.

Keywords:

• e-mail
• educational telecomputing
• message flow and function
• speech acts
• subject matter experts
• telementoring