Teenage peer-to-peer knowledge sharing through social network technology in

secondary schools

Christa Asterhan + Edith Bouton

Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Learning, school and social network technology

Leisure School

Learning, school and social network technology

Leisure School

What do we know empirically?

Informal settings, affinity spaces:

- Pockets of “genuine self-organized peer-to-peer knowledge building” (e.g., Gee, 2015)

Higher education, formal settings:

- When heavily supported by researchers and technology (e.g., Tsovaltziet al., 2014; Greenhow et al., 2015)

Secondary school, formal settings:

- Teachers interact with students – but only few use them for instruction proper, novel pedagogical activities (Asterhan & Rosenberg, 2015; Rosenberg & Asterhan, in press)

- Teachers provide students with psycho-social support, e.g., in times of war (Ophir, Rosenberg, Asterhan & Schwarz, 2015)

Do students spontaneously self-organize in learner communities and collaborate to learn?

First exploration:

1. In-depth interviews with secondary school students (Bouton & Asterhan, 2015)

2. Checked close to 100 teenage SNS study group interaction (Facebook, WhatsApp)

3. In-depth interviews and focus groups with 36 teacher college students (Bar-Tal & Asterhan, under review)

“ When someone prepares for a test he has got to have a summary! So then he writes “I need a summary” and when they, like, give it to him, I mean, they

usually give it to him. (…) I always take summaries from others and such. But when I have a summary I immediately

send it to the whole group to help. Everybody sends summaries, so that

everyone can succeed, ‘cause everyone already helped them.”

“Someone in the group found it and wrote to the group: “Girls, I’m

the “savior”, I have found the summaries” and that day she

posted all the summaries and for two days before the exam we

studies these summaries"

"We have a folder of lesson plans. Whenever someone

teaches a lesson she shares the plan to the folder. This is

excellent, because we do not always have time to construct a

lesson plan and a detailed presentation, so we use each

other’s materials.”

SharingJohn (2012):

“Sharing is the constitutive activity of Web 2.0”

Knowledge sharing is…?

…refers to activities in which individuals make (1) their internally stored knowledge and/or (2) external knowledge sources they have at their disposal accessible to others.

…mainly studied in informational and organizational sciences, but not (really) in educational sciences

… is actively encouraged, regarded very positively

… does not happen often enough in organizations and professional settings (social dilemma)

Student online knowledge sharing in education

4. Quantitative exploration of the phenomenon with surveys

• representative samples of Israeli, Hebrew-speaking teenagers (13-18 yrs)

• Study 1, N = 206

• Study 2, N = 515

Asterhan & Bouton, 2017, Computers & Education

Whether? What?When?

Where?Who? Why?

Survey content Demographic information

SNS activity in general and specific for learning

Sharing categories and frequencyadministrative messages

snapshots and teacher created materials (handouts, etc)

student created content and lesson summaries

unethical: solved homework and other individual assignments

direct peer consultation

Attitudes towards sharing (regret, like, resist etc)

Motives for sharing

In addition (study 2 only) 3 latent variables • Achievement goal orientations (Elliott & Church, 1997)• Individualism – collectivism (Singelis et al, 1995)• Academic self-efficacy

[ Study 1: 32 items, Study 2: 92 items ]

Whether they share? 86% are members of SNT “study groups”

90% share materials at least from time to time

99% believe it improves their academic performance

80% regard it positively

Where?86% prefer WhatsApp, 6% Facebook

76% report that teachers are members of at least one group

When?81% report sharing only occurs after someone asks for it specifically

What is shared and used?

1

1.5

2

2.5

3

3.5

4

4.5

5

5.5

Administrativemsg

Snapshots Contentsummaries

Copying Peer learning

Me

an

sh

ari

ng

in

ten

sity

Shared byparticipant

Used byparticipant

More than 25% admit to

copy frequently

Why share?

1.00

1.50

2.00

2.50

3.00

3.50

4.00

4.50

5.00

5.50

Improvesachievments

Help otherssucceed

Pos. selfconcept

Quid proqup

Gain socialstature

Lack ofeffort

Me

an o

f ag

reem

ent

wit

h m

oti

ve

Belief in quid pro quo

rs = .24

No belief in quid pro quo

rs = -.28

Who shares?

Collectivist value endorsement (β = .29)

Mastery achievement goals (β = .19)

Academic self-efficacy (β = .15)

Gender - mixed

X GPA (self-reported) - only student-created summaries

X Performance avoidance

regret after sharing (rs = .233)

pressure to share (rs = .302)

X Competitive-Individualist value endorsement

Who uses shared materials?

Mastery goals - all forms of shared materials, incl. “cheating” (.13 < rs < .31)

Collectivist values (r = .25)

X Competitive-individualistic, except for “cheating” (rs = .13)

X Approach avoidance

Student peer-to-peer knowledge sharing in higher education

Two additional samples:

N = 482 teacher college students

N = 322 university undergraduate students

Some insights:

→ Phenomenon even more pervasive and frequent

→ More use of Dropbox, Google Drive, blogs

→ Construction of data bases across years that replace syllabus materials in large courses

→ Slightly different patterns: • Age and collectivist values predicts sharing and use• Performance avoidance related to use of shared materials

Conclusions and questions

Empirical examination of everyday student use of SNT for school-related purposes:

• Not only for social and leisure purposes

• But mostly up- and downloading of materials for common use

How does knowledge sharing, a term that originated in the information and organizational sciences, relate to the educational construct of peer collaborative learning?

Not new – but scale is much larger – warrants more attention

• Student perceive it overall very positively

• One fifth even believe they cannot succeed without it

But:

• Learning derivatives created by others - What is gained/lost?

• Transactive memory systems - illusion of knowledge (e.g., Fisher, Goddu & Keil, 2015)?

SO…. IS IT OR ?

“The fact that it’s all so accessible causes our

imagination and our thinking about difficult subjects to atrophy, because we just

shortcut to the quick answers on various networks”

“It sometimes limits imagination and creativity:

(…) we instantly see someone else’s answer

before answering ourselves, and this may dictate our own thought

pattern”

• Student perceive it overall very positively

• One fifth even believe they cannot succeed without it

But:

• Learning derivatives created by others - What is gained/lost?

• Transactive memory systems - illusion of knowledge (e.g., Fisher, Goddu & Keil, 2015)?

SO…. IS IT OR ?

Also:

- What do they do with the materials? How do they choose and evaluate?

- Who has access / excluded? Democratization or stratification?

- Implications for teaching and course design? Teachers unaware

Thank you!

asterhan@huji.ac.il

https://scholars.huji.ac.il/christaasterhan

Collaborators on this work:

• Edith Bouton

• Smadar Bar-Tal

• Hananel Rosenberg

Financial support from: