Teenage peer-to-peer knowledge sharing through social network technology in
secondary schools
Christa Asterhan + Edith Bouton
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Learning, school and social network technology
Leisure School
Learning, school and social network technology
Leisure School
What do we know empirically?
Informal settings, affinity spaces:
- Pockets of “genuine self-organized peer-to-peer knowledge building” (e.g., Gee, 2015)
Higher education, formal settings:
- When heavily supported by researchers and technology (e.g., Tsovaltziet al., 2014; Greenhow et al., 2015)
Secondary school, formal settings:
- Teachers interact with students – but only few use them for instruction proper, novel pedagogical activities (Asterhan & Rosenberg, 2015; Rosenberg & Asterhan, in press)
- Teachers provide students with psycho-social support, e.g., in times of war (Ophir, Rosenberg, Asterhan & Schwarz, 2015)
Do students spontaneously self-organize in learner communities and collaborate to learn?
First exploration:
1. In-depth interviews with secondary school students (Bouton & Asterhan, 2015)
2. Checked close to 100 teenage SNS study group interaction (Facebook, WhatsApp)
3. In-depth interviews and focus groups with 36 teacher college students (Bar-Tal & Asterhan, under review)
“ When someone prepares for a test he has got to have a summary! So then he writes “I need a summary” and when they, like, give it to him, I mean, they
usually give it to him. (…) I always take summaries from others and such. But when I have a summary I immediately
send it to the whole group to help. Everybody sends summaries, so that
everyone can succeed, ‘cause everyone already helped them.”
“Someone in the group found it and wrote to the group: “Girls, I’m
the “savior”, I have found the summaries” and that day she
posted all the summaries and for two days before the exam we
studies these summaries"
"We have a folder of lesson plans. Whenever someone
teaches a lesson she shares the plan to the folder. This is
excellent, because we do not always have time to construct a
lesson plan and a detailed presentation, so we use each
other’s materials.”
SharingJohn (2012):
“Sharing is the constitutive activity of Web 2.0”
Knowledge sharing is…?
…refers to activities in which individuals make (1) their internally stored knowledge and/or (2) external knowledge sources they have at their disposal accessible to others.
…mainly studied in informational and organizational sciences, but not (really) in educational sciences
… is actively encouraged, regarded very positively
… does not happen often enough in organizations and professional settings (social dilemma)
Student online knowledge sharing in education
4. Quantitative exploration of the phenomenon with surveys
• representative samples of Israeli, Hebrew-speaking teenagers (13-18 yrs)
• Study 1, N = 206
• Study 2, N = 515
Asterhan & Bouton, 2017, Computers & Education
Whether? What?When?
Where?Who? Why?
Survey content Demographic information
SNS activity in general and specific for learning
Sharing categories and frequencyadministrative messages
snapshots and teacher created materials (handouts, etc)
student created content and lesson summaries
unethical: solved homework and other individual assignments
direct peer consultation
Attitudes towards sharing (regret, like, resist etc)
Motives for sharing
In addition (study 2 only) 3 latent variables • Achievement goal orientations (Elliott & Church, 1997)• Individualism – collectivism (Singelis et al, 1995)• Academic self-efficacy
[ Study 1: 32 items, Study 2: 92 items ]
Whether they share? 86% are members of SNT “study groups”
90% share materials at least from time to time
99% believe it improves their academic performance
80% regard it positively
Where?86% prefer WhatsApp, 6% Facebook
76% report that teachers are members of at least one group
When?81% report sharing only occurs after someone asks for it specifically
What is shared and used?
1
1.5
2
2.5
3
3.5
4
4.5
5
5.5
Administrativemsg
Snapshots Contentsummaries
Copying Peer learning
Me
an
sh
ari
ng
in
ten
sity
Shared byparticipant
Used byparticipant
More than 25% admit to
copy frequently
Why share?
1.00
1.50
2.00
2.50
3.00
3.50
4.00
4.50
5.00
5.50
Improvesachievments
Help otherssucceed
Pos. selfconcept
Quid proqup
Gain socialstature
Lack ofeffort
Me
an o
f ag
reem
ent
wit
h m
oti
ve
Belief in quid pro quo
rs = .24
No belief in quid pro quo
rs = -.28
Who shares?
Collectivist value endorsement (β = .29)
Mastery achievement goals (β = .19)
Academic self-efficacy (β = .15)
Gender - mixed
X GPA (self-reported) - only student-created summaries
X Performance avoidance
regret after sharing (rs = .233)
pressure to share (rs = .302)
X Competitive-Individualist value endorsement
Who uses shared materials?
Mastery goals - all forms of shared materials, incl. “cheating” (.13 < rs < .31)
Collectivist values (r = .25)
X Competitive-individualistic, except for “cheating” (rs = .13)
X Approach avoidance
Student peer-to-peer knowledge sharing in higher education
Two additional samples:
N = 482 teacher college students
N = 322 university undergraduate students
Some insights:
→ Phenomenon even more pervasive and frequent
→ More use of Dropbox, Google Drive, blogs
→ Construction of data bases across years that replace syllabus materials in large courses
→ Slightly different patterns: • Age and collectivist values predicts sharing and use• Performance avoidance related to use of shared materials
Conclusions and questions
Empirical examination of everyday student use of SNT for school-related purposes:
• Not only for social and leisure purposes
• But mostly up- and downloading of materials for common use
How does knowledge sharing, a term that originated in the information and organizational sciences, relate to the educational construct of peer collaborative learning?
Not new – but scale is much larger – warrants more attention
• Student perceive it overall very positively
• One fifth even believe they cannot succeed without it
But:
• Learning derivatives created by others - What is gained/lost?
• Transactive memory systems - illusion of knowledge (e.g., Fisher, Goddu & Keil, 2015)?
SO…. IS IT OR ?
“The fact that it’s all so accessible causes our
imagination and our thinking about difficult subjects to atrophy, because we just
shortcut to the quick answers on various networks”
“It sometimes limits imagination and creativity:
(…) we instantly see someone else’s answer
before answering ourselves, and this may dictate our own thought
pattern”
• Student perceive it overall very positively
• One fifth even believe they cannot succeed without it
But:
• Learning derivatives created by others - What is gained/lost?
• Transactive memory systems - illusion of knowledge (e.g., Fisher, Goddu & Keil, 2015)?
SO…. IS IT OR ?
Also:
- What do they do with the materials? How do they choose and evaluate?
- Who has access / excluded? Democratization or stratification?
- Implications for teaching and course design? Teachers unaware
Thank you!
https://scholars.huji.ac.il/christaasterhan
Collaborators on this work:
• Edith Bouton
• Smadar Bar-Tal
• Hananel Rosenberg
Financial support from: