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International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning

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01-06-2011

A multimodal approach to coding discourse: Collaboration, distributed cognition, and geometric reasoning

Authors: Michael A. Evans, Eliot Feenstra, Emily Ryon, David McNeill

Published in: International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning | Issue 2/2011

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Abstract

Our research aims to identify children’s communicative strategies when faced with the task of solving a geometric puzzle in CSCL contexts. We investigated how to identify and trace distributed cognition in problem-solving interactions based on discursive cohesion to objects, participants, and prior discursive content, and geometric and cooperative concepts. We report on the development of a method of coding and representation of verbal and gestural content for multimodal interactional data and initial application of this framework to a microethnographic case study of two small groups of 7 and 8-year-old learners solving tangram manipulatives in physical and virtual desktop settings. We characterize the establishment of shared reference points as “coreferences” which cohere on object, para, and meta-levels through both gesture and speech. Our analysis foregrounds how participants establish common referential ground to facilitate collaborative problem solving with either computer-supported or physical puzzles. Using multimodal analysis and a theoretical framework we developed to study interactional dynamics, we identified patterns of focus, dominance, and coalition formation as they relate to coreferentiality on multiple levels. Initial findings indicate increased communication and cohesion to higher-level principles in the virtual tangram puzzle-solving setting. This work contributes to available models of multimodal analysis of distributed cognition using current manipulative technologies for early childhood mathematics education.

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An earlier version of this work was presented at the “It’s About Time” Workshop, Alpine Rendezvous 2009.

In this paper, we take “distributed cognition” to be an emergent property of groups such that at the group level there’s a thought process happening that’s not fully instantiated by any one member of the group (S. Duncan, personal communication, August 21, 2010.) Shared orientation and focus and the mirroring of gesture or overlap of speech in the process of completing a task may demonstrate that individuals are “inhabiting the same state of cognitive being” (McNeill 2006). Distributed cognition is also an enduring interest of UC Santa Barbara linguist John Dubois. As Duncan put it, distributed cognition “gives the lie to the notion that we all function as message-lobbing monads” (personal communication, August 21, 2010). The notion of distributed cognition is a more general descriptor for the points of discursive cohesion, which we use as our primary units of analysis in this paper.

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Title: A multimodal approach to coding discourse: Collaboration, distributed cognition, and geometric reasoning
Authors: Michael A. Evans
Eliot Feenstra
Emily Ryon
David McNeill
Publication date: 01-06-2011
Publisher: Springer US
Published in: International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning / Issue 2/2011
Print ISSN: 1556-1607
Electronic ISSN: 1556-1615
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11412-011-9113-0

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