Education technology - higher education
GH. Khalifeh; S. Latifi
Abstract
Background and Objectives: Currently, all over the world we are witnessing a change in online learning methods and a change towards coollaborative learning methods in the online environment. Due to its collaborative and interactive nature, the online learning environment creates a unique opportunity ...
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Background and Objectives: Currently, all over the world we are witnessing a change in online learning methods and a change towards coollaborative learning methods in the online environment. Due to its collaborative and interactive nature, the online learning environment creates a unique opportunity for the development of individual and collaborative learning if appropriate design approaches are used. Accordingly, if the development of learning skills in an exploratory and collaborative community is considered, designing an online collaborative learning environment is a basic and important element. In fact, creating an exploratory and supportive community is necessary to achieve critical and argumentative thinking skills and should be viewed as an educational method. Therefore, the aim of the present study was to design an online collaborative environment based on argumentative peer feedback and to investigate its impact on the critical thinking skills and argumentation quality of educational science students.Methods: The design of this research was pretest-posttest control group design. In order to carry out the research, an online collaborative environment based on argumentative peer feedback was designed and developed. In this environment, students coollaboratively wrote their opinions about the the topic at hand, provided feedback on peer's writings, and then revised their writings based on the comments of their peers. The research population was all undergraduate students in the field of educational sciences of Shahid Chamran University of Ahvaz in the academic year 2019-2020, and 32 of them were selected as the research sample, and randomly assigned in a pretest-posttest control design, and they were paired as learning pairs (A dyad). The research’s measurement tools were the California Critical Thinking Skills Test and a rubric of assessing of students’ argumentative writing quality. The reliability of the critical thinking test was calculated using Kuder-Richardson Formula 20 reliability coefficient (KR20=0.69). Kappa test (0.82) was also used to measurethe reliability of the argumentative writing quality rubric. The Repeated measures ANOVA was used to analyze the data.Findings: The results showed that providing and recieving argumentative peer feedback in the online collaborative learning environment increased students' critical thinking skills, and also the quality of argumentation. In other words, the the experimental group outperformed the control groupin term of critical thinking andargumentative writing quality.Conclusion: The results of the research indicated the effect of the online collaborative environment based on peer feedback on the students' critical thinking skills and argumentation quality. In fact, the design of such environments strengthens the students' critical thinking and argumentative skills by taking into account the opportunity it provides for students to reason, examine the opinions of their peers, and finally provide feedback to their peers. Therefore, according to the results, it is suggested that online collaborative learning environment based on argumentative peer feedback should be considered as a suitable tool and approach to improve critical thinking skills and increase the quality of students' argumentation.
