| Chapter 1: | Chatrooms and Learning Behaviors |
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Christian still talked a lot, but so did Sara! In fact, Sara was so comfortable that she actively, though politely, challenged the instructor’s assumptions about important social issues. In this case study, I use the bystander effect—a social psychological theory of inhibition in emergency settings—as a lens for examining inhibition in the classroom and in the chatroom. Briefly, this approach suggests that there are some mechanisms that reduce inhibition in the online setting, and some that prohibit individuals from controlling the conversational floor. I describe this study in detail in Chapter 3.
1.2.2 Discussion Quality: A Quasi-Experimental Study
In the second study, I focus on understanding how these behavioral changes influence the content of group discussions. On one hand, we might hypothesize that reduced inhibition in chatrooms would encourage students to express and explore a greater variety of perspectives when engaging in debates surrounding social issues. On the other hand, there is also reason to believe that reduced inhibition might lead to anti-social behavior, which would effectively shut down rational discussion of issues. To explore this question, I conducted a quasi-experimental study in a professional ethics education environment.
For this study, I focused on two sections of a senior-level undergraduate course in professional ethics for computer scientists, which were taught by the same instructor. Over the course of four class periods, small groups of students met twice in the face-to-face classroom and twice in an online chatroom, which they could access from anywhere. I used a counter-balanced study design; on any given day, one class met online and the other met in the classroom. In this way, I obtained transcripts of discussion in both media on each discussion topic.