Chatting to Learn: The Changing Psychology and Evolving Pedagogy ...

The second study, in professional ethics education, uses a quasi-experimental design to determine how these behavioral changes influenced the content of small group discussions. Below, I describe each of these studies in more detail.

1.2.1 Conversational Equity: A Case Study

In the first study, I use a case study method (e.g., Yin, 2003) to examine some of the underlying mechanisms that lead students in foreign language learning situations to participate more in the online environment than they do in the face-to-face classroom. In this case study, I focus on two students—Christian and Sara—in a second-year college French class aimed at helping students integrate grammatical structures from previous classes into more fluent interaction. Christian was a confident senior who was raised in a country with a large French-speaking population. Although there was still room for improvement regarding his language abilities, he clearly was more fluent in French than the rest of the class. Not surprisingly, he talked relatively frequently in the face-to-face classroom. Sara, however, was a shy freshman who felt disadvantaged by having never visited a French-speaking country. She wanted to learn to speak the language, but was terrified of talking in front of the class. As such, she said nothing unless the instructor explicitly called on her to contribute.

When these two students began interacting online, however, things changed.