Explaining and self-regulating multi-attributional diversity in computer-supported collaborative learning (MULTIDIVERSE-CSCL)

• Applicant: Dr. Laura Froehlich
• Subject Area: Social Psychology, Industrial and Organisational Psychology
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 523405753

Distance education programs are increasingly frequent and are characterized by high student diversity (i.e., a high proportion of students from social groups historically underrepresented in higher education). One measure to increase the sense of belonging and performance of students in distance education is collaboration in virtual study groups. Own preliminary work has shown that the combination of high sociodemographic and high task-related diversity poses a particular risk constellation for successful computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) in asynchronous digital learning contexts. The proposed project integrates previous findings on CSCL with social-psychological approaches on explaining and managing team diversity. Work Package aims at explaining the social-psychological mechanisms that impair the structural integration of social networks in CSCL. This lower structural integration in turn negatively predicts students’ sense of belonging and performance. Based on own preliminary work on the influence of social categorization and the consequences of stereotypes in academic contexts, we will investigate whether category-based social perceptions and stereotype-based interactions impair optimal collaboration in diverse CSCL groups. We will combine laboratory experiments with an analysis of behavioral data in real CSCL groups. Work Package 2 will implement intervention and prevention studies to investigate how CSCL groups can be systematically supported in regulating their collaboration so that even sociodemographically diverse CSCL groups can achieve a high social integration and therefore benefit from task-related diversity. The intervention study tests the effectiveness of two dashboards which display information about the integration of the CSCL group to students and provides them with systematic support to increase the integration. The prevention study investigates how a virtual sense of community (we-ness and an identification with the common ingroup of psychology students) can be fostered in the early phase of the collaboration. This prevention measure aims at decreasing the salience of sociodemographic categories and associated stereotypes in order to foster the social integration within CSCL groups. Work Package 2 will conduct experimental prevention and intervention studies within the introductory module of the BSc psychology curriculum at the FernUniversität in Hagen with real CSCL groups. The proposed project will utilize the existing infrastructure at the Research Center CATALPA and the Faculty of Psychology at the FernUniversität in order to conduct the studies in accordance with current research ethics and data protection regulations.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Co-Investigators: Professor Dr.-Ing. Jörg M. Haake; Dr. Niels Seidel