October 2012 Volume 15 Number 4 - Educational Technology ...

exploration. However, in the 1:1 shared-display approach, they encountered a more complex technological setting.
Hence, they often discussed with other members to resolve the technological problems.
Table 4. Frequency and percentage of dialogue threads in the two approaches
Approach Shared-computer 1:1 shared-display
Group G1 G2 G3 G1 G2 G3
Procedure discussion 33(9%) 13(3%) 10(4%) 21(7%) 17(5%) 12(14%)
Direction 21(6%) 23(6%) 26(11%) 17(6%) 19(5%) 8(9%)
Information judgment 33(9%) 71(17%) 26(11%) 26(9%) 65(18%) 11(13%)
Information organization 32(9%) 42(10%) 17(7%) 15(5%) 29(8%) 12(14%)
Self-explanation 53(15%) 94(23%) 38(17%) 83(29%) 59(16%) 7(8%)
Clarification 28(8%) 73(18%) 40(17%) 26(9%) 59(16%) 12(14%)
Group decision 8(2%) 4(1%) 10(4%) 5(2%) 3(1%) 1(1%)
Status probe 32(9%) 13(3%) 22(10%) 25(9%) 31(8%) 4(5%)
Technological problem 12(3%) 10(2%) 5(2%) 19(7%) 23(6%) 13(15%)
Action request 60(17%) 47(11%) 20(9%) 17(6%) 47(13%) 3(3%)
Informal conversation 36(10%) 25(6%) 15(7%) 36(12%) 17(5%) 4(5%)
Total 348(100%) 415(100%) 229(100%) 290(100%) 369(100%) 87(100%)
The interaction patterns in the two approaches were schematized in Figure 4 and Figure 5. It should be noted that the
technological problem, action request, and informal conversation threads were excluded in the interaction pattern
analysis because these threads are not the core activities during collaborative web exploration activities. Moreover,
this study only displays the major transitions among the dialogue threads by ignoring the transition with small
probability. More specifically, the transition probabilities were compared with the random transition probability
under uniform distribution (1/8) by Chi-square because there were eight major dialogue threads. Only the transitions
which demonstrated significantly higher probability than the random transition did under the uniform distribution
were displayed in the transition diagram.
Figure 4 and Figure 5 illustrate that the students exhibited different interaction patterns in the two approaches. The
interaction patterns show that the students often took a self-explanation and clarification strategies together during
their discussion (Clarification -> Self-explanation and Self-explanation -> Clarification) in the shared computer
approach. Based on such discussions, they further discussed how to organize the information they founded
(Clarification -> Information organization). However, the results of these discussions were not used in the discussion
of information judgment and group decision because there is not a major transition between these dialogue threads.
In other words, the discussion becomes fragmented because the dialogue threads did not coherently facilitate the
group to judge information and make group decision.
Figure 4. The interaction pattern in the shared-computer approach
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