Effects of Social Roles Rotation on the Cognitive Learning Process in Online Collaborative Conversation

Abstract

Online collaborative conversation is one of the crucial approaches to promote students' collaborative skills and cognitive development. Students' social roles in collaborative learning have a key impact on the process of collaborative learning activities and the development of students' cognition. What are the differences in the cognitive structures and processes between rotated-role and fixed-role in students' groups? This paper explored this question by empirical research. The results of epistemic network analysis showed that the rotated-role groups had more high-level cognition and more complex cognitive structure, while the fixed-role groups had more management activities. In the rotated-role groups, the leaders can better mobilize the atmosphere, organize and coordinate the cognitive processes of the team, so that to contribute more to the collaborative conversations. The cognitive depth and efficient of fixed-role groups significantly decreased over time. These imply that in online collaborative conversation activities, role-rotation can be used to promote higher-order cognitive development, and fixed-role can be used to improve management efficiency. Teachers should encourage team leaders to take on more cognitive activity organization and coordination tasks in online collaborative conversation activities. In the later stages of online collaborative conversation activities, teachers should strengthen intervention and support for fixed social role groups.

Received: 20 May 2024 | Revised: 18 September 2024 | Accepted: 12 October 2024

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest to this work.

Data Availability Statement

Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no new data were created or analyzed in this study.

Author Contribution Statement

Linjing Wu: Conceptualization, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing, Supervision, Project administration; Yu Gao: Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing, Visualization; Yujia Zang: Investigation, Formal analysis, Writing - original draft; Puliang He: Data Curation, Resources.