Let's Give Them Something to Talk About: Analyzing Group Conversations During Two Stage Collaborative Exams
Abstract
For collaborative, two-stage exams, students are required to periodically answer individual multiple-choice exam questions, then immediately re-answer a subset of them as part of a collaborative group exam. In a previous study of group scantron responses for the collaborative portion, we discovered that while a majority of the time groups choose the answer given by the highest-scoring member of their group, students do not simply agree with the "smartest" member of the group all of the time when choosing group responses. Oftentimes they opt instead to agree with the group consensus regardless of the "smartest" member's choice, or even pick an answer that was within the minority, or not individually suggested at all. To delve deeper into the thought processes behind their answers, we recorded group discussions of a number of groups during the collaborative portion of an exam. In six introductory astronomy courses conducted during the Fall 2018/Spring 2019 academic year, a subset of student groups consented to be recorded during the group discussions they participated in on a number of exams throughout the semester. We present the results of our analysis of these discussions, where we looked for common trends in how students interacted with one another to arrive at a consensus, as well as looked for changes in group dynamics over the course of the semester. We will also compare these results with group member performances on the exams and final to determine whether an increase in collaboration among group members translated into improved performance on the exams.
- Publication:
-
American Astronomical Society Meeting Abstracts #235
- Pub Date:
- January 2020
- Bibcode:
- 2020AAS...23520203M