Modeling the coupled dynamics of student behaviors and reasoning during collaborative learning activities

 

Investigating how students' non-verbal behaviors (posture, gesture, vocal register, visual focus) influence and are influenced by the substance of their reasoning during collaborative group work. Our analysis reveals a dynamic coupling of students' behaviors, epistemic framings (ways of approaching knowledge generation) and physics reasoning. This has instructional implications, by identifying easy-to-spot behaviors that tend to indicate the presence of productive student reasoning.

 

Behavior Clusters

In watching video data of student groups during introductory physics tutorials, we notice a remarkable thing.  During each 45 minute period the members within each group tend share similar clusters of behavior.  The whole group usually transition together between these behavior clusters.  We have identified four distinct clusters and assigned them to theory-neutral color codes: green, blue, yellow, and red.

 

Cluster name	Behaviors	Looks like:
Green	sitting upright eye contact hands gesturing Interrupting speech
Blue	Hunched over Eyes down Hands down/writing Intermittent speech
Yellow	Shifting in seat Eyes around the room Hands fidgeting / touching face Laughing / smiling	<coming_soon>
Red	Sit straight up Eyes on TA Hands down or smaller gestures Intermittent speech	<coming_soon>

 

These four behavior clusters are exhibited across groups the groups are in at least one of these clusters for almost all of the time spent in tutorial.  They can be stable for minutes at a time, and they switch abruptly, on the order of five seconds.  Often the transition in behavior is precipitated by one student exhibiting behaviors different from the cluster the group is in at the time.  We call these "bids".  For example, often a group will be exhibiting the blue cluster (hunched over, looking down at worksheet) when suddenly one student sits up and looks around at the rest of the group.  Often such a bid will facilitate a transition of the rest of the group into green mode as they engage in discussion.  See figure below:

 

Figure: student at bottom left making a 'bid' for a transition in group behavior

 

 

Papers

Scherr,R.E., & Hammer,D. (in press). Student behavior and epistemological framing:  Examples from collaborative active-learning activities in physics. accepted to Cog. & Instr.: Preprint