Meaning making in CSCL: conditions and preconditions for cognitive processes by groups

Meaning making is central to the interactions that take place in CSCL settings. The collaborative construction of shared meaning is a complex process that has not previously been analyzed in detail despite the fact that it is often acknowledged as being the distinguishing element in CSCL. Here, a three-minute excerpt from a discussion among three students is considered in some detail. The students are reflecting on their analysis of mathematical patterns in a synchronous online environment with text chat and a shared whiteboard. Several interaction methods and group cognitive processes are identified. The analysis suggests a number of conditions and preconditions of such interaction. These are necessary for achieving the potential of CSCL as the accomplishment of high-order cognitive tasks by small groups of learners. An understanding of the conditions and preconditions of the small-group meaning-making process may aid in the design and analysis of CSCL activities, as well as in the development of a theory of group cognition. THE UNIQUENESS OF CSCL The vision of CSCL is that networked computers can bring learners together in new ways and that shared digital environments can foster interactions that produce new understandings for the groups and their participants. Accordingly, the uniqueness of CSCL pedagogical and technological designs consists in their techniques for supporting group interactions that can solve problems, gain insights, build knowledge. To guide design, CSCL theory needs to explicate the processes by which groups accomplish these cognitive tasks and to specify the preconditions for such interactions to take place. In the formative days of the history of CSCL (see Stahl, Koschmann, & Suthers, 2006), collaboration was defined as “a process by which individuals negotiate and share meanings relevant to the problem-solving task at hand... a coordinated, synchronous activity that is the result of a continued attempt to construct and maintain a shared conception of a problem” (Roschelle & Teasley, 1995, p. 70). The study of collaboration so defined suggests a shift away from the psychology of the individual to the small group as the unit of analysis, and a process-oriented focus on the socially-constructed properties of small-group interaction: “Empirical studies have more recently started to focus less on establishing parameters for effective collaboration and more on trying to understand the role that such variables play in mediating interaction” (Dillenbourg et al., 1996, p. 189, emphasis added). These redefinitions of the object of research differentiate an approach to CSCL interested in group cognition from the orientations of educational-psychology studies of individual learning in settings of cooperation and/or distance learning. CSCL has been defined explicitly in terms of the analysis of meaning making. A keynote at CSCL 2002 proposed: “CSCL is a field of study centrally concerned with meaning and the practices of meaning making in the context of joint activity, and the ways in which these practices are mediated through designed artifacts” (Koschmann, 2002, p. 18). Recently, this approach has been re-conceptualized as studying the “practices of understanding” (Koschmann & Zemel, 2006). At the CSCL 2005 conference, a research agenda for the field was proposed in terms of “intersubjective meaning making” (Suthers, 2006b). This emphasis has a two-fold implication. It suggests that empirical studies investigate the processes of meaning making that take place in the studied settings. But also, in theoretical terms, it implies that we should be analyzing the nature of shared meaning and the structures of small-group meaning-making processes in general. For all the talk about meaning making, there has been little empirical analysis of how meaning is actually constructed in small-group interactions. It is generally assumed that meaning is created and shared through processes of interaction, communication and coordination. But the nature of these processes is taken for granted. Even a special journal issue on “Meaning Making” presents alternative analyses of a particular interaction recording and reflects on the methodologies used, but never explicitly discusses what is meant by the term “meaning making” (Koschmann, 1999). Similarly, a recent book devoted to the topic of Meaning in Mathematics Education concludes that “various aspects of communication which may affect the construction of meaning are discussed. On the other hand, the problem of the construction of meaning itself is not really tackled” (Kilpatrick et al., 2005, p. 137). For some time, I have been trying to work out structures of collaborative meaning making. At ICLS 2000, I presented a model of collaborative knowledge building (Stahl, 2006b, Ch. 9), followed at CSCL 2002 with a theoretical framework for CSCL (Stahl, 2006b, Ch. 11). In an extended analysis of building collaborative knowing illustrated with my SimRocket data, I presented elements of a social theory of CSCL centered on meaning making (Stahl, 2006b, Ch. 15). I subsequently distinguished between interpretation from individual perspectives and meaning as shared and embodied in artifacts in the world in my CSCL 2003 paper (Stahl, 2006b, Ch. 16). At CSCL 2005, I argued that groups can think, that they can have cognitive agency (Stahl, 2006b, Ch. 19). My book on Group Cognition develops this notion that small groups of learners—particularly with the support of carefully crafted digital environments—have the potential to achieve cognitive accomplishments, such as mathematical problem solving. Here, the term “group cognition” does not refer to some kind of mental content, but to the ability of groups to engage in linguistic processes that can produce results that would be termed “cognitive” if achieved by an individual, but that in principle cannot be reduced to mental representations of an individual or of a sum of individuals. Thus, the theory of group cognition is similar to theories of distributed cognition, but now the emphasis is more on distribution among people rather than with artifacts, and the cognitive accomplishments are high-order tasks like math problem solving rather than routine symbol manipulations. Recently, my colleagues and I have been investigating specific structures of meaning-making practices, analyzing online interactions among math students. For instance, we characterized “math-proposal adjacency pairs” (Stahl, 2006d), looked at how a group could solve a math problem that none of its members could solve (Stahl, 2006a), and investigated how students used a referencing tool in our environment (Stahl, 2006c). We try to closely analyze brief interactions in well-documented case studies to determine the social practices or methods that groups use to accomplish their meaning making. Thereby, we seek to determine structures of small-group cognitive processes. We believe that the foundation of CSCL as a unique field of study is the investigation of the meaningmaking processes that take place in online collaborative settings. The analysis of intersubjective meaning making or group cognition is not the whole story; one can, of course, also analyze individual learning and other psychological phenomena or larger activity structures and communities-of-practice, but we believe the processes of small-group interaction are of particular centrality to CSCL. A CASE OF GROUP COGNITION Although meaning and related topics like grounding have been debated for millennia, they have usually been discussed using examples that were made up by the authors to seem like natural, commonsensical interactions or using data from laboratory conditions. To study interaction “in the wild” or with examples that occurred in reallife situations is a new and important approach that we can borrow from ethnography (Hutchins, 1996) and ethnomethodology (Garfinkel, 1967). However, finding cases of interaction that are relevant to CSCL research interests cannot be left up to chance. CSCL research aims to inform technological and pedagogical design. Therefore, cycles of design-based research are often appropriate. One must put students in situations where they are motivated to pursue certain kinds of tasks in particular kinds of environments. The situations must be instrumented to capture an adequate record of the interactions that take place. In this paper, we will observe meaning making in a brief excerpt from Spring Fest 2006 of the Virtual Math Teams (VMT) service at mathforum.org. The collaborative context was set by organizing a contest: members of the most collaborative teams would win prizes. Students were recruited globally through teachers who were involved in other Math Forum activities. The team in the excerpt consisted of two students who apparently went to the same school and one from another time zone in the US, as well as a facilitator from the Math Forum, who provided technical assistance—this is all that either the students or the facilitator knew about each other. Pedagogically, the topic for discussion was an open-ended exploration of geometric patterns. An initial pattern of squares formed from sticks was given. The students were to figure out the formulae for the number of squares and the number of sticks at stage N first, and then explore other patterns that they or other teams invented. The technological environment combined text chat with a shared whiteboard. It included a referencing tool for pointing to areas of the drawing from chat postings (Mühlpfordt & Stahl, 2007). There was a supplementary wiki for sharing results between teams. To support the research methodology, all activities were logged. The chat and whiteboard could subsequently be replayed at any speed and stepped through. Virtually all aspects of the group interaction including everything that the participants knew about each other’s actions were captured and available for analysis (see Table 1 and Figure 1). Each team in Spring Fest 2006 met for four sessions over a two-week period. Each session lasted a little over an hour. At the end of each session, the teams were supposed to post their findings on a wiki for the other teams to read. Between sessions, the facilitators posted feedback to the teams on their whiteboards. The feedback generally acknowledged the team’s accomplishments and suggested next steps. In the case considered here, the team was particularly encouraged to explain what they had done because it was not clear to the facilitators from the interactions that the team members always understood what each other was doing. Table 1. A three minute excerpt of the chat log. Line numbers have been added and the delay in seconds from the previous message has been calculated. line participant chat posting time delay 1393 Quicksilver (a) was define the problem, (b) was the solution which we got... 07.29.46 1394 bwang8 we calculated the # of square if the diamond makes a perfect square 07.29.48 2 1395 Aznx We can define the problem. 07.29.48