How the Chameleon Effect Impacts Introverts and Extroverts in Social and Academic Settings

The chameleon effect is a phenomenon in which people unconsciously copy other people’s behaviors, so they match the people around them in interactive settings. It is important for college students to know what type of personality they have and how that personality type is impacted by this phenomenon. The result of this knowledge can help them better understand their behavior in academic and social settings, which will make them more aware of said behaviors. This will help students be safer in these situations, as well as help them to stop the behavior faster. The chameleon effect and the personality traits of introversion and extroversion have been studied in previous literature in many ways separately, but not together in the manner this research has done. This study investigated how the chameleon effect may impact introverts and extroverts differently in social and academic settings, with the intention of finding who is more impacted by the phenomenon in these settings. The study used a survey with two parts: an introversion and extroversion scale and four stories; two about social settings and two about academic setting. The data analysis looked at the correlation between introversion/extroversion and the chameleon effect. The hypothesis was that in social settings, extroverts will be more impacted by the chameleon effect than introverts, and vice versa in academic settings. The data did show this pattern with stipulations. The hope is to expand this research to other populations, such as children

Being in-sync: A multimodal framework on the emotional and cognitive synchronization of collaborative learners

Collaborative learners share an experience when focusing on a task together and coevally influence each other’s emotions and motivations. Continuous emotional synchronization relates to how learners co-regulate their cognitive resources, especially regarding their joint attention and transactive discourse. “Being in-sync” then refers to multiple emotional and cognitive group states and processes, raising the question: to what extent and when is being in-sync beneficial and when is it not? In this article, we propose a framework of multi-modal learning analytics addressing synchronization of collaborative learners across emotional and cognitive dimensions and different modalities. To exemplify this framework and approach the question of how emotions and cognitions intertwine in collaborative learning, we present contrasting cases of learners in a tabletop environment that have or have not been instructed to coordinate their gaze. Qualitative analysis of multimodal data incorporating eye-tracking and electrodermal sensors shows that gaze instruction facilitated being emotionally, cognitively, and behaviorally “in-sync” during the peer collaboration. Identifying and analyzing moments of shared emotional shifts shows how learners are establishing shared understanding regarding both the learning task as well as the relationship among them when they are emotionally “in-sync.

How Design Science Research Helps Improve Learning Efficiency in Online Conversations

In this design science research paper, we report on our constructing and evaluating an attention-guidance system that we integrated into a computer-supported collaborative learning system. Drawing on social constructivist literature, our proposed design focuses on attracting, retaining, and, if necessary, reacquiring users’ attention on task-relevant information in online collaborative literature processing. The investigation involved an experiment across two sections of students in a human-computer interaction course. Results show that the new design allowed users to consistently reflect and evaluate the content of a text as they capitalized on one another’s reasoning to resolve misconceptions. Moreover, we found that the new system increased users’ perceptions of learning. However, the difference in knowledge gain scores was marginally significant and represented a medium effect size. Interestingly, we found that the attention-guidance system supported more efficient learning. Finally, we discovered that task-oriented reading of text, revisions of incomplete or incorrect ideas, and perceptions of learning mediated the relationship between software system and learning efficiency. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications

Consistency between descriptors, author-supported keywords and tags in the ERIC and Mendeley databases

The purpose of this study was to identify the language consistency between indexers, authors and taggers in the ERIC and Mendeley databases. This survey was conducted using content analysis methods and techniques to evaluate the language consistency between indexers, authors and taggers in the ERIC and Mendeley databases and also to determine common keywords. The sample for this study was comprised of top twenty journals in the field of Educational Research based on the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) of Web of Science, indexed in the ERIC database in 2014. Finally 499 articles published in the above-mentioned journals in 2014 were chosen as the sample base for the dataset. Note that only articles with author-supported keywords, indexed in the ERIC database and also tagged in the Mendeley database from January 2014 to August 2016 were eligible to be assessed. Descriptors assigned to the articles on the ERIC database and tags associated to the articles on the Mendeley database for the period from January 2014 to August 2016 were extracted. Also author-assigned keywords assigned to all 499 articles were collected. Finally we created a software based on object-oriented programming (OOP) in C++ to analyze the search results. Descriptive statistics and measures, and thesaural term comparison show that there are important differences in the context of keywords from the three groups. This study demonstrated that there were differences between the tagger, author and professional indexer views of the words used as tags, descriptors, or author-assigned keywords. The results showed that the consistency between the author-supported keywords and user tags of the 499 articles in the Mendeley was 15 percent; while the consistency between descriptors designated to the articles in the ERIC database and user tags associated to the articles on the Mendeley were three percent. On the other hand, the consistency between descriptors assigned to the articles in the ERIC database and the author-assigned keywords were 4 percent. Finally, the language consistency between the three above-mentioned groups was 1.1 percent. Also note that the presence of descriptors in the ERIC thesaurus was 34 percent, which were more than the author-supported keywords and tags. The findings showed that the consistency between the keywords used by authors and taggers were more than the keywords chosen by indexers and authors, and by indexers and taggers. This means that three sides of the information representation triangle, i.e., indexer, author and tagger are unfamiliar with each other’s language. It is worth noting that tags are useful supplements to controlled vocabularies, since the former provide a means for social organization of knowledge outside the framework of the latter. The low consistency between tags and descriptors in this research indicates that Mendeley users do not use the same terminology as subject specialists who maintain descriptors in the ERIC thesaurus. Further research involving semantic analysis of Mendeley tags may reveal an emerging vocabulary suitable for inclusion in the ERIC thesaurus as a controlled vocabulary

Social Comparisons in the Classroom Revisited: Insights Into Underlying Processes Using Immersive Virtual Reality as a Research Tool

Social comparisons are commonplace in every classroom and widely acknowledged as central determinants of students’ academic self-evaluations (see, e.g., Dijkstra et al., 2008; Trautwein & Möller, 2016). Most prominently, in educational psychology research, social comparisons have been assumed to be the cause behind the well-known Big-Fish-Little-Pond effect (BFLPE; Marsh, 1987), suggesting negative effects of higher class-average (or school-average) achievement on students’ academic self-concept while controlling for individual achievement. Whereas existing research has provided compelling evidence of the effects of certain reference groups on students’ self-evaluations (Marsh et al., 2017; Marsh & Seaton, 2015), the actual mechanisms behind the proposed effects and how students process social information while learning are still a black box. The present dissertation was aimed at gaining insights into the respective underlying processes (i.e., the “inner workings” of this black box) by using immersive virtual reality (IVR) as a research tool. IVR technology provides an unprecedent opportunity for educational psychology research to integrate ecological validity and experimental control in research designs to gain authentic and yet standardized insights into classroom processes, such as social comparisons and beyond (see, e.g., Blascovich et al., 2002). To this end, the present dissertation was aimed at a theoretical as well as a methodological advancement of research on social comparisons in the classroom. To address these objectives, the dissertation drew on three empirical studies with an IVR classroom including an experimental manipulation of classmates’ performance-related behavior. First, pursuing a more in-depth theoretical understanding of social comparisons and the respective processing of social information in the classroom, the dissertation aimed to identify covert and overt social comparison behaviors that (a) reflect students’ cognitive and behavioral responses to social comparison information in an IVR classroom and (b) ultimately explain individual differences in students’ self-concepts. Studies 1 and 2 used students’ self-reports (of their interpretation of classmates’ performance-related behavior) and eye movement data (e.g., visual attention on classmates) to identify different social comparison processes in the IVR classroom and to provide insights into the mechanisms that underlie the BFLPE. Second, aiming to provide insights into how IVR classrooms can be used as an experimental tool in educational psychology research, Study 3 focused on the configuration of an IVR classroom to authentically simulate and control a (social) classroom environment. The study provides insights into how different fields of view, virtual avatar visualization styles and virtual classmates’ performance-related behaviors affect students’ processing of social information provided in the IVR classroom. Taken together, by using an IVR classroom as an experimentally controlled yet authentic research setting, the present dissertation was able to advance the theoretical understanding of social comparisons and respective processing of social information in the classroom that ultimately explain individual differences in students’ self-concept. Moreover, the present dissertation demonstrates how IVR classrooms and the corresponding standardized process data can be used to gain insights into classroom processes, such as social comparisons. The dissertation thereby provides implications for research on both social comparisons in the classroom and the use of IVR as an experimental tool in educational and social psychology research in general