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Researchers:
Data Analysis
The VMT Project has the practical goal of establishing a new service at the Math Forum. It approaches this goal through a design-based research effort that starts simply and develops the design of the service through an iterative process of evaluating the results of trying new features. From a basic research perspective, this is a valid way to explore the nature of collaborative learning and small-group interaction in math chats. In particular, the VMT Project generates data illustrating “group cognition,” as virtual teams produce sequences of problem-solving moves, where the actions of different participants merge into an integrated discourse and cognition emerges as an achievement of the group as a whole.
The VMT Project was designed as an experimental test-bed that captures lasting traces of collaborative interactions. The chat logs or persistent chat rooms preserve a rather complete record of the collaborative interactions that take place. The interactions involve challenging, creative problem-solving of mathematics, including critical reflection on the problem-solving and discourse about it. Thereby, the interactions produce numerous examples of group cognition in which teams produce cognitive results that cannot be attributed to any one individual but that arose out of the interactions among multiple participants situated in the group context. The records left for analysis by researchers contain most of the information that was available to the participants themselves. Since the students did not know each other from before the chat and could not observe each other except through the behavior that took place in the chat room, they could only understand each other’s messages and actions based on what took place inside the chat room. The same information is available to researchers for understanding the messages and actions, providing an adequate record for analysis of how the group cognition took place. In contrast to classroom studies of face-to-face interaction, there is no need for videotaping and transcription, which introduce potential analytic difficulties.
The VMT Project allows researchers to see how small-group interaction and group cognition take place within a specific set of circumstances – e.g., small groups of K-12 students discussing math – with a particular form of technological mediation – i.e., chat with shared whiteboard and the features of VMT-Chat rooms. Synchronous math chats are different from asynchronous science threaded discussions and from face-to-face social conversation. The VMT Project is able to study and document the distinctive nature of math chats and their specific potentials for fostering group cognition. In this way, it illustrates with one small example a much broader vision of engaged learning in online communities of the future.
Research in the VMT Project has been strongly influenced by visiting researchers. Jan-Willem Strijbos from the Netherlands led an intensive data coding approach. Analysis based on the coding was continued by Fatos Xhafa from Spain and Albania. On a more theoretical level, Stefan Trausan-Matu explored Bakhtin and related approaches to narrative interaction. Alan Zemel, the project’s post-doc, brings a strong conversation analysis perspective to understanding what takes place in the chats. Martin Wessner from Fraunhofer-IPSI in Germany spent a summer in Philadelphia designing the VMT Lobby for group formation. Elizabeth Charles brings a science education perspective to the project from Canada. Currently, five doctoral students at Drexel University are working on dissertations analyzing different aspects of the VMT Project and suggesting future developments for it.
A large number of publications have already emerged from the project, including a book on group cognition, presenting the historical and theoretical background of the project.
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