It is hard to disagree that modern students require modern education methods, and one such approach that is widely used is electronic discussion forums. In general, the topic was studied by numerous researchers, but Wise et al. (2013) identified some gaps in the knowledge and tried to fill them in their article. The purpose of this paper is to provide a summary of the author’s study, mentioning its research problem, questions, methods, findings, and implications.
The need to contribute messages to online discussion forums has become an integral part of students’ lives. However, as stated by Wise et al. (2013), “productive participation in online learning conversations requires more than just making posts,” and students also need to engage with the posts contributed by others (p. 324). The research problem raised by the authors is that these research forums often fail to be effective because not all students are actively engaged. Wise et al. (2013) want to answer the following research questions: what are the learners’ listening behaviors patterns during their engagement with existing comments, and how can these behaviors be maintained in the future?
In order to answer the two questions, the authors invited 113 students to participate in the study, having 96 of them agreed. The participants had to engage in face-to-face sessions and online discussions, and students faced an organizational behavior challenge during each discussion, having these challenges “drawn from a set of real, anonymized situations submitted by students at the start of the term” (Wise et al., 2013, p. 328). The researchers managed to identify “a lot of invisible activity” because listening behaviors took almost three-quarters of students’ time spent on online discussions (Wise et al., 2013, p. 336). Three distinct patterns of listening behaviors were identified, including Superficial Listeners, Intermittent Talkers; Concentrated Listeners, Integrated Talkers; and Broad Listeners, Reflective Talkers (Wise et al., 2013, p. 337). As for the analysis of how these behaviors appeared over time, the study showed that some deepened and others altered. Finally, implications discussed by the author include the need to offer different approaches to and support of online discussions, as well as probably review the general expectations from these discussions and students participating in them.
Reference
Wise, A. F., Speer, J., Marbouti, F., & Hsiao, Y. T. (2013). Broadening the notion of participation in online discussions: Examining patterns in learners’ online listening behaviors. Instructional Science, 41(2), 323–343. Web.