The Role of Inservice Teachers’ Motivation, Learning Strategy and Social

Ability Profiles in a CSCL Environment

Petri Nokelainen
Pekka Ruohotie
University of Tampere
Finland
firstname.lastname@uta.fi

Miikka Miettinen
Henry Tirri
Helsinki University of Technology
firstname.lastname@hiit.fi

Jaakko Kurhila
University of Helsinki
jaakko.kurhila@cs.helsinki.fi

Abstract: The process of employing Finnish inservice teacher’s (N=54) self-rated

motivation, learning strategy, and social ability profile into collaborative learning tasks of
an on-line learning environment was investigated. The profile information obtained from
a 34-item questionnaire was stored into a system consisting of a set of asynchronous
collaborative knowledge constructing tools. Learners were expected to form a group of
two, and annotate by highlighting and commenting an on-line document. The preliminary
results show that annotation quality in the learning tasks was rated low on those students
who like practical instructions from teacher. Annotation quality was rated high on those
students who are interested in the course topic and generally prefer to study demanding
subjects from which they can learn something new. Both self-made highlightings and
comments were experienced to be more useful for the learning process than those made
by other learners. Preliminary results of the e-mail survey indicated that all the
respondents strongly agreed when asked if the system brought added value to their
learning processes.

Introduction

This paper investigates the process of employing inservice teacher’s self-rated motivation, use of
learning strategies, and social ability profile information into collaborative learning tasks of an on-line learning
environment. Main focus of the paper is to study how profiling information (Miettinen, Nokelainen, Kurhila,
Silander & Tirri, 2002) is related to various tasks (such as on-line group formation, peer-to-peer highlighting
and commenting of the course material) performed by adult learners in a computer supported collaborative
learning system.

The Study

Information about motivation and use of strategic skills in learning was gathered with an on-line
questionnaire system, EDUFORM (Nokelainen, Niemivirta, Kurhila, Miettinen, Silander & Tirri, 2001), in the
beginning of a web-based university-level statistics course in Fall 2002. The sample consisted of 37 female and
17 male Finnish vocational education inservice teachers (N=54) conducting their post-graduate degree. The
respondents´ age range from 21 to 51 years (median = 36 years).
 The relation of learner’s motivation, learning strategy, and social ability information to cognitive
outcomes and completion of various tasks in the EDUCOSM system (Kurhila, Miettinen, Nokelainen, Floréen &
Tirri, 2002) was investigated with log file data analysis and a self-rated questionnaire. Empirical evaluation of
the system in real-life collaborative learning situations was based on the results of log file data analysis and post
survey via e-mail.
The user log was collected during the course from September 27 to October 26, 2002. The data file
contains parameter values for numerous user activities, for example, individual time spent annotating and
reading documents, number of highlightings, comments and newsgroup messages.
The questionnaire (Ruohotie, 2002; Ruohotie & Nokelainen, 2002) contained 34 items measuring three
dimensions of professional learning: motivation (12 items), learning strategies (10 items), and social abilities (12
items). The response options varied in a five-point Likert-scale from "1 - Completely Disagree" to "5 -
Completely Agree".
The motivation category (Pintrich, Smith, Garcia & McKeachie, 1993; Ruohotie, 1999; Nokelainen &
Ruohotie, 2002) consists of three sections: (1) a value section; (2) an expectancy section; and (3) an affective
section. The value section has three subscales: (1.1) intrinsic goal orientation, (1.2) extrinsic goal orientation,
and (1.3) meaningfulness of study. The expectancy section consists of two subscales: (2.1) control beliefs and
(2.2) self-efficacy. The affective section includes one component: (3.1) test anxiety. The learning strategies
category (Pintrich, 2000; Ruohotie, 2000; Martinez, 2001) consists of four sections: (1) metacognition in
learning; (2) metacognition in practice; (3) learning by doing; and (4) resource management. The social abilities
category consists of two sections: (1) interpersonal and intrapersonal abilities (Tirri, K. et al., 2002); and (2)
self-concept (Marsh & O’Neill, 1984).
Motivational, learning strategy and social ability profile information was embedded into the system
consisting of a set of tools (i.e., "Search", "Newsgroups" and "Filters") for asynchronous collaborative
knowledge constructing. The idea of learner-centered learning in the context of this study is that learners are
expected to take responsibility for their own learning: The instructor gives an orientation to the topic through
theoretical face-to-face lectures. She also gives few pointers to selected on-line resources. The system provides
tools to process information and collaborate with peer learners. We believe that this is in harmony with modern
psychological and educational theoretical perspectives based on the assumption that a learner is an active
contributor in the individual learning process (Snow, Corno & Jackson, 1994).
After two face-to-face sessions covering selected theoretical issues, the course relied following two
weeks solely on peer-based distance learning in the system. During this time, learners were expected to (1) form
a group of two, and (2) annotate by highlighting and commenting an on-line document. The group mate was
selected anonymously amongst the other available learners with a special tool. The only personalization
information provided in the dynamic selection process was the motivation, learning strategy and social skill
profile presented for each learner. In addition, the group mean was reported for each dimension to help decision-
making. Each group worked anonymously on a different document, brought into the system by the course
lecturer. The learning task had following phases: (1) establishing a newsgroup for the document, (2) highlighting
and (3) annotation the relevant issues in the document, and (4) discussing about the document with peer learner
in the newsgroup.

Findings

Various dependencies between variables produced from the questionnaire, log file data and e-mail
survey were investigated. Statistical analysis was conducted with Bayesian network modeling (Myllymaki,
Silander, Tirri & Uronen, 2002) due to fact that we could not guarantee neither multivariate normality
assumption nor equal sample sizes or variances within groups. The preliminary results with small empirical data
(N=54) were as follows:
• Annotation quality in the learning tasks was rated low on those students who like practical instructions
from teacher.
• Annotation quality was rated high on those students who are interested in the course topic and generally
prefer to study demanding subjects from which they can learn something new.
• Students who are nervous in test situations had lower scores than those who need performance related
feedback from teacher.
• All the respondents strongly agreed when asked “if the system brought added value to the learning
 process” and “if it changed their studying habits favourably” (when compared to the traditional
university lectures).
• All the learners would recommend the system (i.e., highlighting and commenting documents) for other
courses, too.
• Both self-made highlightings and comments were experienced to be more useful for the learning
process than those made by other learners. This finding needs further investigations with larger
empirical samples.
• Respondents made no distinction between anonymous and full name annotations. We expected that
learners would be more relaxed when annotating anonymously and thus this research finding should be
verified or falsified with other samples in the future.

Preliminary results of the e-mail survey indicated that all the respondents strongly agreed when asked if
the system brought added value to the learning process and if it changed their studying habits favorably, when
compared to the traditional university lectures. All the respondents strongly agreed when asked if they would
recommend the system for other courses. One of the most interesting preliminary research finding was that both
self-made highlightings and comments were experienced to be more useful for the learning process than those
made by other learners. Another interesting preliminary result of the e-mail survey was that the respondents
made no distinction between anonymous and full name annotations.

Conclusions

A shared document-based annotation tool, EDUCOSM, was presented and its usefulness in real-life
web-based university-level statistics course was empirically evaluated. The process of employing adult learners
self-rated motivation into collaborative learning tasks of an on-line learning environment and learning outcomes
was investigated.
The profile information obtained from a 34-item questionnaire was stored into a system consisting of a
set of asynchronous collaborative knowledge constructing tools. Learners were expected to form a group of two,
and annotate by highlighting and commenting an on-line document.
This real-life use of the system convinced us that shared document-based annotation promisingly
supports learner-centered collaborative learning. However, further studies are needed to investigate possible
distractive effects of peer-to-peer annotation to individual learning processes as self-made highlightings and
comments were experienced to be more useful than those made by other learners.

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