How gender composition influences individual knowledge elaboration in CSCL

The aim of the study is to explore the gender difference in learning achievement and knowledge elaboration process in CSCL. A sample of ninety-six secondary school students, aged 16, participated in the two-week experiment. Students were randomly paired to solve six problems about Newtonian mechanics. Their preand post-test performances and online interactions were analyzed. We found that female students’ learning performance and knowledge elaboration process were sensitive to their partner gender, but that’s not the case for male students. Besides, due to a divergent knowledge elaboration process, mixed-gender dyads run the risk of disadvantaging female students in CSCL. Introduction To date, there is very little research looking into the gender difference of knowledge elaboration process in Computer-Based Collaborative Learning (CSCL). Questions such as whether, in CSCL, female and male students benefit equally from the mixedand single-gender dyads, whether the knowledge elaboration in mixed-gender dyads presents a different picture in comparison with that in single-gender dyads, and how students’ learning performance is related with the knowledge elaboration process still need empirical investigation. We start with a discussion on the properties of CSCL that may play a role in students’ knowledge elaboration in collaboration. Knowledge Elaboration in CSCL The text-based Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) has been dominantly applied in CSCL practices. It affords the opportunity of a well-balanced knowledge elaboration. Students’ interactions are preserved in a shared context, which seems to be privileged to deepen their thinking and trigger a high level elaboration. The explicit back-references may facilitate more thoughtful and reflective discussions as well. However, the reduced shared context is also expected to have reduced utility (Suthers, 2006). In addition, due to the ease of typing and exchanging messages, synchronous CSCL may generate numerous fragmented and incoherent interactions. The breakdown in interaction may exacerbate the potential problem in mixed-gender collaboration. Making inferences to students’ external representations during problem solving may unravel the process of students’ cognitive elaborations (DeWindt-King & Goldin, 2003). Kumpulainen and Mutanen (1999) differentiate three cognitive processing modes. The off-task activity refers to the social talk that is irrelevant to collaborative task. The procedural processing refers to the routine execution of task without improving the ideas. The interpretative or exploratory processing refers to students’ deep engagement in problem solving activity, which is characterized by critical thinking and a systematic analysis of problem information. Based on that, author (2008) endows each message with an elaboration value: -1 (off-task), 0 (procedural) or +1(interpretative), and plots the sums of the values for each individual learner along the timeline. Such kind of visualization has revealed, at least, three patterns of knowledge elaboration process. The divergent pattern (on the left in Figure 1) is featured by two diverging curves. It shows an increasing cognitive discrepancy between two participants. The cross pattern (in the middle in Figure 1) illustrates that individual knowledge elaboration processes are closely intertwined. The participants keep a close eye on their partner’s processing and take turns dominating the knowledge elaboration. The parallel pattern (on the right in Figure 1) indicates that the cognitive gap between the two participants keeps the same during collaboration. With the help of the patterns, we are motivated to investigate whether there is a difference between mixed-gender and single-gender dyads with regard to the knowledge elaboration process, and whether students’ learning achievement is affected by it.