A domain-independent, transferable and timely analysis approach to assess student collaboration

Abstract

Collaborative learning environments require intensive, regular and frequent analysis of the increasing amount of interaction data generated by students to assess that collaborative learning takes place. To support timely assessments that may benefit students and teachers the method of analysis must provide meaningful evaluations while the interactions take place. This research proposes machine learning-based techniques to infer the relationship between student collaboration and some quantitative domain-independent statistical indicators derived from large-scale evaluation analysis of student interactions. This paper (i) compares a set of metrics to identify the most suitable to assess student collaboration, (ii) reports on student evaluations of the metacognitive tools that display collaboration assessments from a new collaborative learning experience and (iii) extends previous findings to clarify modeling and usage issues. The advantages of the approach are: (1) it is based on domain-independent and generally observable features, (2) it provides regular and frequent data mining analysis with minimal teacher or student intervention, thereby supporting metacognition for the learners and corrective actions for the teachers, and (3) it can be easily transferred to other e-learning environments and include transferability features that are intended to facilitate its usage in other collaborative and social learning tools. © 2013 World Scientific Publishing Company.