Effects of ability grouping on students’ collaborative problem solving patterns: Evidence from lag sequence analysis and epistemic network analysis

Abstract

Grouping students according to their abilities and maximizing each member's role is a key issue in collaborative learning research. Although some studies have investigated the effects of homogeneous or heterogeneous grouping on collaborative learning performance, the differences between two approaches remains largely unexplored. During the course of an eight-week term, 42 student teachers participated in a multitasking collaborative problem solving activity. This study employed content analysis, Lag Sequence Analysis, and Epistemic Network Analysis to examine the effects of ability grouping on the behavioral patterns and cognitive networks of the student teachers. The coding results show that, compared with the homogenous groups, the heterogeneous groups had more socially oriented communication, and they were also more inclined to propose questions concerning learning task. Students with similar ability were more successful in establishing common representations of problem solving in peer interactions. In addition, the statistical analysis showed that heterogeneous groups had significantly higher learning performance than homogeneous groups. Revealing and comparing the behavioral patterns, heterogeneous groups had more behavioral sequences that were significantly associated with learning performance, which partly explained the significantly higher performance of the heterogeneous group than the homogeneous group. Compared with the homogeneous groups, the most striking difference of the heterogeneous groups was in how they proceeded negotiation. Furthermore, Epistemic Network Analysis detailed how they developed cognitive networks of multitasking collaborative learning from different levels. At the group level, more closely connected CPS skills were observed in the heterogeneous group. At the individual level, three learners in the heterogeneous groups had a distributed discussion focus and trajectory change due to the emerging of student-teacher relationships. In the homogeneous groups, three learners were very close in their discussion focus at beginning and the changes in the trajectories are also very close. Finally, we stated the implications and limitations and pointed out future research directions.