Students’ Participative Stances and Knowledge Construction in Small Group Collaborative Learning with Mobile Instant Messaging Facilitation

Abstract

Mobile instant messaging (MIM) has become increasingly popular socially, but its educational impact on collaborative learning is still unclear. This study aims to understand how collaborative learning develops in small group discussions on a MIM platform. We collected interaction records from two groups of graduate students, who voluntarily set up private MIM groups to discuss collaborative projects. The records were analyzed with two set of codes to respectively examine levels of knowledge construction and learner participative stances. A processing mining technique was also applied to visualize how knowledge was built up on different tasks. Results suggested that MIM is probably most helpful with planning tasks and increasing interactivity with the facilitation of the pop-up notification. Informal leaders emerged in the discussions, who actively maintained group dynamics and also expressed ideas. Tasks requiring evaluation and creation might invite more higher-order knowledge co-construction.