NSF Awards: 2101341
The MC^2 Project is short for “Mapping, Clarifying, and Communicating Key Ideas about Collaborative Learning to STEM Audiences.” It is a literature synthesis project that will bring together collaborative learning researchers, education practitioners (i.e., teachers and teacher leaders), and experts in equity. The goal is to develop new ways to organize, present, and disseminate information about collaborative learning and transform findings from the research literature into an actionable and usable format for practitioners.
Watch the video to learn about the innovative, map-centric, bibliometric approach we are using to first map the computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) literature. CSCL is a mature, extensive body of interconnected knowledge. CSCL considers the essential STEM practices such as argumentation, project-based learning, peer instruction, equitable participation, and collective inquiry.
The video also gives an overview of the later project stages. As the work progresses, we will share the mapping of the literature topics with our panel of equity experts, practitioners, and researchers. Through a mediated discussion process around the map (i.e., Delphi Method), we will clarify the understanding that researchers and practitioners have on the different topics. This process should help uncover the gaps in knowledge between what researchers have established and what practitioners want to know. We will then work to achieve a shared understanding among the panelists that will lead to creating and producing new practitioner-friendly formats to communicate what we’ve learned. If successful, the approach could be applied to other high-interest topic areas.
Dalila Dragnic-Cindric
Postdoctoral Researcher
Thank you for watching our video! Our project is in its early literature mapping stage. We invite you to comment on any aspect of our project that is interesting to you. We are especially interested in discussing the following questions through the lens of diversity, equity, and inclusion:
Rachel Dickler
Jeremy Roschelle
Executive Director
Glad you are visiting our project's video; we're excited about working with practitioners to synthesize what's known about collaborative learning with technology. We'd love your input on the questions that Dalila posted or any thoughts of your own!
Judi Fusco
Senior Researcher Stem Teaching and Learning
Welcome! Echoing Dalila and Jeremy that we're glad you're here! Looking forward to your questions and thoughts.
Rachel Dickler
Hi Dalila, Jeremy, and Judi! It is so exciting to learn about your MC^2 project! The mapping of CSCL literature will be so helpful towards the work being conducted at iSAT. One area that we are particularly interested in related to K-12 classroom teaching and learning practice is paired programming.
Dalila Dragnic-Cindric
Postdoctoral Researcher
Hi Rachel, thank you for visiting our project. Yes, we hope the mapping of this literature will be useful to the researchers working to support students in collaborative groups such as your amazing group at iSAT. Thank you for bringing paired programming as a topic of interest to our attention. As we investigate our literature map, we should be able to tell you more about how this topic is situated in the broader literature and how it connects to other nodes on the map.
Nathan Holbert
Associate Professor
Great idea! Certainly a useful, and very needed, effort to help translate the intellectual work of the CSCL community into impact in the classroom. I'm curious about how you constructed the topic network. With some squinting it seems like you're linking topics through references, is that right? Could you give a brief overview of how you constructed these networks of CLCL ideas on the first pass? No need to get technical, I'm just curious about how you're thinking about what constitutes a node and a link.
I like the idea of curating the network to make it more relevant to the needs of educators. This should ensure that the data represented is rich and useful to educators. However, how are you thinking about supporting the exploration of this network? As you know, ensuring productive and meaningful interactions with such a tool can be challenging!
Judi Fusco
Senior Researcher Stem Teaching and Learning
Hi Nathan,
Thanks for your question! You are correct, we're examining references of the articles. Bibliometric Coupling analysis looks at how much overlap there is in the references of each article.
The nodes (aka the circles) are research topics and their size is proportional to the number of publications in the topic. The particular research topic name is determined by examining the articles that are in each cluster. There can be much debate over the actual name of the topics and subtopics -- we'll get into that debate as we curate the map.
The lines or links are the connections between topics and line strength does show how strongly connected topics are.
If you are interested in more technical information, please see the Bibliotools/Bibliomaps site. Sebastian Grauwin, the researcher who created the tool, has a great deal of information about the technique. I'm also happy to take more questions here.
Re: the exploration of the network, we'll be creating a curated map, with the help of other researchers and practitioners. We'll be further exploring the consensus and disagreement about which topics researchers and practitioners view as important to K12 learning and practice in our adapted Delphi Method stage of the work (clarifying stage).
Thanks again for your questions and interest! Let us know if you have additional questions.
Arun Balajiee Lekshmi Narayanan
Dalila Dragnic-Cindric
Nathan Holbert
Nathan Holbert
Associate Professor
Thanks for this detail. Very helpful!
Judi Fusco
Jeremy Roschelle
Executive Director
Keep the questions coming :)
jeremy
Judi Fusco
Joshua Danish
Professor and Program Chair
Hi Jeremy, Judi, and Dalila,
Thanks for sharing, this is really cool! Having looked at similar bibliometric networks before, one question that comes to my mind is that I think the use of citation counts and references sometimes privileges certain kinds of work, but may not mirror what "experts" think is important or relevant. In terms of your current project, I'd imagine that other factors like a paper being theoretically v design oriented v experimental may also influence how useful they are for practitioners. I wonder if you have given thought to ways that those kinds of ideas, or similar, might be made visible in the network? Or why it is not necessary?
Looking forward to hearing more!!
Joshua
Dalila Dragnic-Cindric
Dalila Dragnic-Cindric
Postdoctoral Researcher
Hi Joshua,
Thank you for raising this excellent point. We agree that bibliographic analyses privilege certain kinds of work and that work that is often not the type of work that is relevant to a teacher in a K12 classroom or reflective of what researchers think should count. This issue is further complicated because Web of Science (WoS) and similar databases all have their own imperfect algorithms for ranking search results that are not made transparent to the users. So, although we know how the Bibliomaps tool mapped the literature based on WoS results, a layer of mapping inherent to WoS remains obscured from us. As you pointed out, our focus on translating research into practice requires that we stay mindful of our purpose and intended audiences.
We want to ensure that the map we take to our expert panel, consisting of practitioners and researchers, is accurate and relevant to both groups, so we plan to apply our own learning sciences and teacher education expertise to further refine the map produced by the Bibliomaps tool. We will then debrief with peers to check for the soundness of our approach and the refined map. As we center diversity, equity, and inclusion in this project, Dr. Sherice Clarke, our project evaluator, has raised another critical consideration: has the existing CSCL scholarship centered on DEI, or are such research work and publications yet to come. This important question permeates our thinking as we enter the map refinement process and think about what is visible on our map and why or why not. We hope to distill some methodological recommendations for the researchers who will do similar work in the future.
In our conversations with practitioners, the teachers tend to approach research-based recommendations for practice with an important question: “Will this work for my students in my classroom?” Our work is guided by this perspective, and we hope that our expert panel and literature map will help us understand what exists in the literature and what does not but should. We’d be very interested to learn more about your work on literature mapping and especially lessons learned that you think could be useful for this project.
Dalila
Judi Fusco
Joshua Danish
Joshua Danish
Professor and Program Chair
Thank you Dalila or the detailed reply! This sounds really wonderful and I can't wait to hear more about the process and outcomes as you move forward. I think we as a field will learn so much from you regarding how to make our research more relevant for practitioners. Thanks!
Judi Fusco
Judi Fusco
Senior Researcher Stem Teaching and Learning
Thanks for watching the video and your questions and comments! I am eager to begin phase 2 of our work where we are talking with both researchers and practitioners.
Josh Sheldon
Project Lead
Hi Folks!
Thanks for sharing this work. I look forward to following along and learning along with you what gems this uncovers & generates.
I have all sorts of thoughts and questions, which I'll spew in no particular order:
Judi Fusco
Jeremy Roschelle
Executive Director
Josh, on number 3, our vision is an interconnected series (or web) of writings that teachers and researchers can pursue, based on their interests. We are aiming to deliberately be non-linear, as a teacher may care most about collaborative learning & self-regulation or another may care most about collaborative learning and lesson planning. thanks for your questions, jeremy
Dalila Dragnic-Cindric
Postdoctoral Researcher
Hi Josh,
Thank you for your questions and suggestions! I like the idea of involving students as the end-users of collaborative learning in the classroom and agree with you that we would get helpful new perspectives on what matters for translation from research into practice. In this relatively small project, we did not plan to include students in our expert panel stage. This might be an excellent and well-justified expansion of the Delphi method in the future for us and other educational researchers. We also don't have the bandwidth for manual coding, so that we will rely on bibliographic tools in this go. Judi may have more to say on this topic, but in my opinion, based on what I am seeing in the initial map, the tool is pretty good at identifying key areas and critical pieces in the literature. I think those areas will likely yield topics for the collaborative teacher/researcher writing that Jeremy mentioned. I think that more human expertise and coding might be helpful if we want to get into more specialized and nuanced areas of literature. I hope we may get to try this in our future work, and compare bibliometric tool's outputs to what we see through coding. Thanks for making us ponder these issues, Dalila.
Judi Fusco
Senior Researcher Stem Teaching and Learning
Hi Josh!
I was so excited to do the Video Showcase to get great questions and help us think more. Thank you!
My reply builds on Dalila's reply so I replied to hers. I agree that the initial map is showing us a lot of different critical themes in the literature. In a "reverse engineering" way we're also learning more about Web of Science is giving us results and prioritizing topics. We aren't stopping at what the search and the bibliometric tool shows us. While we aren't crowdsourcing, in the next stage, we are bringing together expert practitioners and researchers to have conversations and help us really see what is important. We do hope to hear what is missing during these conversations. (Dalila described our work modifying the Delphi Method in the video and mentioned again in her reply.)
I appreciate the thought about crowdsourcing--I have been thinking about ways we can hear from more practitioners and researchers in the process and will continue to do so.
Agree that students could bring good perspectives to this work -- they always have great insights and this could be something we investigate in the future. I'm seeing some articles that focus on students' experiences during group/collaborative work and wonder what practitioners will bring in around their experiences with students and what they have observed and learned. I hope that our process does turn up gaps that will help inform what else is needed!
For #3, we are early and Jeremy's vision is true and we will be working very collaboratively with our experts from practice and research to determine what they will look like. What do you imagine might be helpful?