New Article – Gender diversity dynamics in a Computer Supported Collaborative Learning

🎉 Exciting News! Our article has just been published in the magazine of Computer Assisted Learning! 📰 We delved into the fascinating world of online group learning among adults, unravelling the mysteries of emergent team roles and their intricate connection to gender dynamics in communication. 🌐👥

Have you ever wondered how team roles subtly surface and evolve in online group learning discussions? We did, too! Our research explores the subtle nuances of team roles and their subversive emergence, especially when viewed through the lens of gender diversity, in order to understand how to support more productive learning for all participants.

Gender and gender diversity are group features affecting social interaction and are critical for gender-inclusive and equitable education. As such, the role of gender and gender diversity is of particular relevance to computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL). However, up until now, research on this topic in CSCL remains scarce. Those studies that explore gender frequently utilise a binary gender view, investigating collaboration patterns in terms of differences between men and women despite the pitfalls of this binary view, e.g. the risk of reproducing gender stereotypes.

Through gender diversity modelling based on group communication analysis, this study used a novel approach to investigate the role of gender in CSCL. It explored how gender diversity in CSCL is associated with emergent roles in small group interaction, providing evidence about how gender diversity interacts with the dynamics of group communication in a unique CSCL scenario.

In this explorative study, we used group communication analysis (GCA) to identify emergent team roles in the communication of triads in a CSCL escape game, realised through a Minecraft computer game. We elaborated on the differences between the team roles with respect to gender-diverse and non-diverse groups of our sample (N = 123) to estimate the role of gender diversity in CSCL learning processes.

The clustering of the group communication resulted in four emergent team roles with distinct communicative patterns: learner, lurker, follower, and leader. Non-diverse teams were more likely to be dominated by leaders, whereas gender-diverse teams showed more egalitarian tendencies in their group communication. Further, in gender-diverse teams, there were more learners, and interaction was more productive overall.

👩‍💻👨‍💻 Dive into the details of our research to discover:
1️⃣ How gender diversity influences emergent team roles in CSCL group communication.
2️⃣ The innovative method of identifying these roles through AI-supported group communication analysis.
3️⃣ The role of gender diversity in shaping the group learning process.

🔗 Curious to explore more? The full article, complete with our AI model details, speaker identification, and comprehensive results, awaits your curiosity. Do not miss the chance to contribute to the methodological discourse in CSCL research and foster more gender-inclusive education. 🌐📚 Ready to embark on this enlightening journey with us? Click here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jcal.12942 🚀🔍 #CSCLResearch #GenderDiversity #GroupLearning #AIInEducation #TeamRoles