A Study of Peer Discourse in Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning Environment

Abstract

Working with peers at computers may cultivate social interaction but what patterns of student-student talk are associated with statistical thinking in an IT environment are not well studied. An observation study focusing on social interaction was therefore conducted in the context of statistics classroom teaching. The observation study drew on Mercer’s work [9] to categorise student-student talk as exploratory, cumulative, or disputational. Most talk was of the exploratory type, characterised by reasoning and statistical thinking, and only a few instances were classified as cumulative when students were attempting straightforward learning tasks or maintaining harmonious social relations. No instances of disputational talk were observed. A finer grained analysis of students’ talk, using an adaptation of Kumpulainens’s framework [1], identified some forms of talk that were used for maintaining social interaction, while other forms were associated with making reasoning explicit and activating higher order thinking for a variety of sophisticated tasks, for instance, deducing practical implications for regression parameters.