This could have been such an interesting paper had the authors not succumbed to what is a disease in our field, small (n=33) and unrepresentative (graduate students pursuing a master's degree in education) samples. The idea was to determine the impact of small group size on social presence in learning, where social presence was measured in three dimensions:
- The Work Group Cohesion Index, developed by Price and Mueller (1986), was used to measure workgroup cohesion in organizational contexts.
- The Sociability Scale (Kreijns et al., 2007) was originally designed to determine the perceived degree of sociability of computer supported collaborative learning.
- The Sociability Scale (Kreijns et al., 2007) was originally designed to determine the perceived degree of sociability of computer supported collaborative learning.
Oh, what a larger scale and more comprehensive study could have done with this, actually getting into the differences in these three models, looking at the nuance a large sample size would provide, and perhaps identifying conditions (cultures, subject area, personalities) in which one or another is a more useful tool. Ah, but we get none of this. We get only this: "Our results suggest that by manipulating group size, students' perceptions of cohesion, and sociability were positively increased." Sigh.
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