Group awareness information to support academic help-seeking

Schlusche, Christian; Schnaubert, Lenka; Bodemer, Daniel

Abstract

Students are expected to deal with complex learning material, that regularly challenges their learning processes especially in the first semester. When students ask peers for explanations, they apply a functional learning strategy, known as academic help-seeking. But finding peers to discuss questions on learning materials is difficult for those that are new to university. Finding adequate peers for help-seeking requires awareness about their knowledge and competencies in and beyond the learners’ own study group; i.e. group awareness. This paper investigates how group awareness information supports academic help-seeking among first-semester students on a Moodle-based learning platform that has been adapted with a newly developed extension to collect, transform and visualize group awareness information about peers. In a field study accompanying an introductory statistics lecture (N = 107), we examined (1) motivational, attitudinal and social characteristics of helpees that asked for help on the platform, (2) the effect of provided group awareness information on the selection of helpers, and (3) the cognitive characteristics of selected helpers and their difference from the helpees. The participating students were invited to seek help from their peers within Moodle and had access to a sortable list of all course members in order to find an appropriate helper. The control group (n = 55) only saw the full names of the peers while the treatment group (n = 52) was additionally provided with self-assessed group awareness information (competence and availability of a helper). Unfortunately, participants rarely used the platform and only 22 help-seeking episodes were recorded. Results indicate that helpees did not differ regarding motivational, intentional or social factors from the rest of the course. The overall occurrences of sorting the list was higher for the condition provided with group awareness information, but both groups did not differ with respect to the competence of selected helpers. The results provide useful, practical insights bringing online help-seeking into an educational context.

• Conference Name: ICCE 2019 - 27th International Conference on Computers in Education
• Conference Location: Kenting, Taiwan
• Start Date: Dec 2, 2019
• End Date: Dec 6, 2019
• Publication Date: Nov 19, 2019
• Deposit Date: Apr 21, 2023
• Volume: 1
• Pages: 131-140
• Book Title: 27th International Conference on Computers in Education. Conference Proceedings Volume 1
• ISBN: 9789869721431
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/19009373
• Related Public URLs: https://apsce.net/icce/icce2019/dw/ICCE2019%20Proceedings%20Volume%20I.pdf