A Social Network analysis of the development networks of cooperative base groups
Published in Computational Sciences and Education
Social Network Analysis (SNA) provides insights in the efficiency of groups, yet this method is seldom used in educational research to better understand the efficiency of techniques to improve group work. This paper was written by two authors, one lecturer (Nel) who implemented a technique to improve group work, and the other one (Van Staden) skilled in using SNA to better understand the efficiency of group work in educational settings.
Van Staden used SNA previously in two group settings, namely teachers who teach Mathematics, and post-graduate students in a distance education setting.
The Mathematics teachers were required to use an online group to learn from one another, to share their knowledge, and to create a shared knowledge base (doctoral studies). The results showed that some of the grade leaders did not share information with the grade teachers, resulting in an overload of the head of department as all teachers asked her for assistance. The grade head's work was at one stage late as she refused to participate in the online group, and were unaware of an inspection, while the grade teachers' work was up to date. This information was useful to help the HOD to understand why she was overloaded. However, the school principal did not want to use the information to lighten the workload of the HOD, and he also did not talk to the relevant teacher. The result was that the very loyal HOD, who was also involved in the management of the school, resigned to find a new job with less stress at another school.
The post-graduate students in distance education were petrified when they enrolled for a module, and only then learned that they will no longer write a final examination. Instead, they had to use a difficult e-portfolio platform to build e-portfolios as method for alternative assessment. Van Staden created small groups for these students in an online platform (Arend) to take up the tasks of cooperative base groups. Cooperative base groups is a techique which requires of students to take up three tasks. While they take up these tasks, they build relationships with one another as they learn to trust one another. Then, Van Staden used SNA to explore the efficiency of the technique. The results showed that the students who performed well, participated more than those who isolated themselves and did not want to build relationships. It also showed that he students who shared the most, were better connected, and most of the distinction students were located central in the social networks, to which she refers as development networks.
For this study, undergraduate students participated in the research during emergency remote education. As they were banned from campus, author A created small WhatsApp groups for the students, and implemented the cooperative base group technique to help the students to build relationships over a distance. The results are carefully discussed in the paper titled Effectiveness of the cooperative base group technique in facilitating cooperative learning in small WhatsApp groups for first-year computer science students: a multi-level social network analysis. \
In this video, Van Staden provides a sneak peak in the results of the previous study, and uses all of the sociograms created during this research to show the differences between the development networks of each of the CBGs. Maybe, it can motivate educational researchers to explore this method to better understand the efficiency of group work in other settings. It is important to note that the larger CBGs (this study) worked better than the smaller CBGs (previous study).
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