Analyzing the Social Knowledge Construction and Online Searching Behavior of High School Learners During a Collaborative Problem Solving Learning Activity: a Multi-Dimensional Behavioral Pattern Analysis

The present study aims to explore the behavioral patterns of the social knowledge construction process and the online searching behaviors in a collaborative problem solving learning activity for high school students, and further compares the different behavioral patterns of the high- and low-performing teams. A total of 78 high school students from two schools participated. This study applied sequential analysis to analyze the students’ social knowledge construction and online searching behavior from a large amount of screen-recording data. Interestingly, the results indicate that social interaction that is irrelevant to the discussion task is significantly correlated with academic-related discussion content. Reaching a higher cognitive level of social knowledge construction (e.g., reaching agreement or applying newly constructed meaning) contributes to a successful team project. For online searching behavior, the high-performing teams exhibited systematic online searching behavior and concentrated on the task, while the low-performing teams displayed chaotic searching behavior and were distracted from the task at hand, and seemed to rarely propose their searched results or ideas in their discussions. Based on the results, several possible explanations and suggestions are proposed including the need to promote more adaptive motivation and to provide scaffolding for collaborative skills.