Collaborative dispositions, knowledge co-construction and monitoring in collaborative problem solving

Abstract

Dispositions are trends or frequencies of acts performed consciously, habitually and automatically, influenced by beliefs, attitudes, personal values or commitments (Katz & Raths, 1985; NCATE, 2002). Thus, collaborative learning dispositions are students’ commitments, beliefs, contributions, or attitudes towards collaboration (Wu, Ho, Lin, Chang, & Chen, 2013). In a similar context, a person who has a certain level of disposition will display certain behaviors, so dispositions can be used to predict behaviors that may occur (Katz & Raths, 1985). To enhance learners’ collaborative learning skill, it is necessary to start from teacher students’ collaborative learning dispositions, which may potentially have impacts on their future students’ learning opportunities.

This study aims to investigate what kinds of activities students focus on during collaborative learning processes. Also, the research explores whether there is any difference in the way students demonstrate and contribute diversely in group work when they possess different collaborative disposition scores, measured by questionnaires, which were based on research by Wang, MacCann, Zhuang, Liu and Roberts (2009). Videos from five groups of teacher students (N = 14) were collected and observed. First, the process-oriented qualitative analysis was carried out to assign meaningful events to separate categories of knowledge co-construction and monitoring activities. Then, quantitative analyses were conducted to explore activities executed most regularly as well as correlation between collaborative disposition scores and students’ contributions.

The results of video data, gathered from the PREP21 project indicate that participants were actively sharing ideas, showing approval or disapproval about members’ contributions. Also, they frequently monitored how group tasks had progressed, then suggested following actions. Unexpectedly, there was no considerable relationship between measured collaborative disposition levels and enacted individual level collaborative problem-solving contributions. However, in a case study analysis, active and passive students displayed differently. Additionally, interconnection between knowledge co-construction and monitoring was shown.