The role of academic motivation in Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning

Copyright and Moral Rights for the articles on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. For more information on Open Research Online's data policy on reuse of materials please consult the policies page. 47 courses at various faculties of the Open University in Israel and found that the majority (80%) of students contributed only a small amount (20%) of messages. But not only differences in the amount of contributions by students have been found. For example, De Laat and Lally (2003) showed that students in an online E-learning Master's programme also differed with respect to the type (cognitive, affective, metacognitive) of contributions. In a Bachelor's freshman course of educational science, Schellens and Valcke (2005) found significant differences with respect to both amount and type (social, cognitive) of discourse. Although recent research findings indicate that learners differ with respect to the amount and type of discourse contributed, little is known about what the causes of these differences are. Within the field of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning, researchers try to understand what the underlying reasons for a lack of contributions to cognitive discourse are and how to solve them. For example, Lowry and colleagues (2006) found that informatics learners who in an experimental design collaborated in class and were complemented with ICT established higher levels of communication quality than learners who collaborated only virtually. Hurme and colleagues (2007) analysed the interaction patterns among secondary school children who worked online in pairs on mathematical problems. Metacognitive activity varied among participants, which subsequently influenced the interaction among pairs of learners. Furthermore, by using Social Network Analysis 2 some pairs became central contributors to discourse, while others were less active and were positioned on the outer fringe of the social network (Hurme, Palonen, & Järvelä, 2007). Recently several researchers have investigated the role of motivation in CSCL. For example, by measuring goal-oriented motivation (Pintrich & De Groot, 1990), Yang and colleagues (2006) found evidence that motivation is positively related with how learners perceive each other's presence in online courses. Järvelä and colleagues (2008) found that students who were working together in groups of 3-5 students reported more (favourable) learning goals and fewer performance goals in the face-to-face setting than students in virtual groups. Besides goal-oriented motivation, several other factors might influence motivation like the degree of self-determination of learners (Ryan & Deci, 2000a, 2000b). For example, in an online setting learners …