Page 127 - Educational Technology A Primer for the 21st Century

7.4 Analysis and Measure Social Learning 117
technologists is different from what computer scientists and artificial intelligence
researchers call deep learning in the context of machine learning.
Content interaction is usually measured by content analysis, which is a method
to analyze the procedures with text (Rourke, Anderson, Garrison, & Archer,2001).
The text usually includes chats, discussion boards, and log file data. The content
analysis includes three steps: (1) adopting a coding scheme, (2) coding the text,
(3) analyzing the results.

Case 2 Content analysis of a collaborative inquiry learning among four elementary
schools in China

Zheng (2017) analyzed the final products of a collaborative inquiry activity. The
participants are 196 pupils from 4 classes in four elementary schools in China. The
pupils were randomly assigned to the groups of four or five.
At first, Zheng (2017) selected the coding scheme proposed by Zhang et al.
(2011) to analyze the level of knowledge building. The scheme includes scien-
tificness and complexity, as shown in Table 7.2.
In order to make sure the coding is credible, two raters coded all the discussion
text independently. The raters compared the coding, and Zheng calculated the
inter-rater agreement that achieved 0.91.
Finally, Zheng (2017) calculated the percent of each knowledge level. The result
is shown in Table 7.3.
Regarding scientificness, the result indicated that 0.4% of the discussion tran-
scripts were prescientific, 1% of them were hybrid, 18.6% of them were basically
scientific, and 64% of them were scientific. Zheng (2017) concluded that most
learners had acquired scientific knowledge about tools in daily life.
In complexity aspect, the result demonstrated that 16% of discourse transcripts
were unelaborated facts, 67.3% of them were elaborated facts, only 0.9% of them
were unelaborated explanations, and 15% of them were elaborated explanations.

Table 7.2 Coding scheme of knowledge building
Code Explanation
Scientificness Prescientific Contains misconception and naive conceptual
framework
Hybrid Contains misconception and some scientific
information
Basically scientific Not precise, but applies the scientific framework
Scientific Consistent with scientific knowledge
Complexity Unelaborated facts Simple statements
Elaborated facts Elaboration on terms, phenomena, etc.
Unelaborated Includes reasons, relationships, or mechanisms
explanations
Elaborated Elaborations on reasons, relationships, or
explanations mechanisms