Why You Should Give Your Students Automatic Process Feedback on Their Collaboration: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment

In Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL), students learn in small groups to achieve learning benefits outside what would be possible for individual students. As in other forms of learning, students need feedback on the quality of their work. Still, writing high-quality informative feedback requires time on the part of educators. This makes it less feasible to provide quality feedback at scale. Given the importance of group dynamics in CSCL, quality feedback should also contain information about group processes and discussion quality. Emergent roles provide a natural anchor point for this.
We propose a method to automatically deliver highly informative, textual process feedback for CSCL forum discussion tasks in an introductory teacher education class, focusing on individual students’ group communication. This feedback is generated from several discourse indicators, that are used to derive emergent roles of the students. From that we derive feedback about strengths and potential for improvement. In a randomized control trial, we show that the highly informative feedback generated with our method is preferred by the students. Implications and avenues for future research are discussed in light of these findings.