Do Students’ Learning Behaviors Differ When They Collaborate in Open-Ended Learning Environments?

Researchers have long recognized the importance of using technology to support students’ collaboration in learning and problem solving tasks. Recently, there has been a lot of research in capturing and characterizing student discourse and how they regulate each other when they perform learning tasks in pairs or in small groups. In this paper, our goal is to dive a little deeper into how students collaborate, and the learning behaviors they exhibit when working in pairs on a learning by modeling task, while also teaching a virtual agent in the Betty’s Brain system. We report the results of a quasi-experimental study, where students were divided into two groups: one group worked in pairs and the other group worked individually. The results illustrate that students in the collaborative group built more correct causal maps than those working individually, and their pre-post test results show significantly higher learning gains in the science content. A differential sequence mining algorithm applied to their action sequences captured in log files showed differences in the learning behaviors between the two groups. The differences imply that the collaborative groups were better at debugging their evolving causal maps than the students who worked individually.