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Transactions: WSEAS TRANSACTIONS ON ADVANCES IN ENGINEERING EDUCATION
Transactions ID Number: 29-929
Full Name: Laura Guerra
Position: Professor
Age: ON
Sex: Female
Address: El Viñedo, Valencia
Country: VENEZUELA
Tel: 0058-241-8243590
Tel prefix:
Fax:
E-mail address: lguerra@uc.edu.ve
Other E-mails: lguerra14@gmail.com
Title of the Paper: Virtual Conversations
Authors as they appear in the Paper: Laura Guerra, Francisca Grimon
Email addresses of all the authors: lguerra@uc.edu.ve,lguerra14@gmail.com, grimon.francisca@gmail.com
Number of paper pages: 10
Abstract: The formation of engineers involve enabling students in their own specialty knowledge, and, in skills related with critical thinking, reflection, argument development with verifiable and sustainable evidence, discussion management, negotiation and consensus solutions, and convincing, allowing them to improve the decision-making. This research contributes to the study of argumentative discourse, introducing a pilot scheme which is to characterize how students gathered in groups to argue their positions during a speech to their peers, via the Internet, to solve a mathematical problem. The study focuses on the connection between the academic performance of the students and the activities of building knowledge. Besides that, epistemological, argumentative aspects and pattern of dialogue are considered. The research is classified as exploratory, descriptive and experimental design. The methodology is a combination of proposals by Weinberger, Chang, and the author. A C!
ase Study was used, specifically the Problem Solving to design tasks. A Virtual Classroom was built under Moodle platform, where there were exercises materials, interactive program to study, and self-assessment links to related books, etc, available to the students. In this place, discussion forums were developed without a teacher's presence in order to save the students messages that come from the discussion to do the task. In order to analyze the results of the investigation, it is taken as an analysis unit the full message posted by each student: all messages were coded by two different researchers, and then the Kappa coefficient was 82%. Among the results obtained is a large proportion of interactions that reflects a correct handling of the relationship between the given problem and the theoretical foundations to applications in specific situations, showing a good level of knowledge construction. However, the new approaches and ways of solving problems were few. Often, !
the students ignored the messages of other members of the group, leadi
ng to a repetition of the issues that were previously raised and, therefore, most of the discussions were not focused on the task. No evidence different to the result of the mathematical calculation was presented. Although the social interactions were out of this research, it was clear that the members of the group did not get rapport between them and, consequently, the engagement to participate in the forum activities was not strengthened. For all these reasons, there is not a enough evidence to ensure that the academic performance of the students make be better using these strategies. Finally, to optimize the successful implementation of this type of methodological strategies, the presence of the teacher in the discussion forums should be considered so that he performs the necessary interventions to guide students towards constructing knowledge
Keywords: argumentation, discourse analysis, dialogue patterns, academic performance
EXTENSION of the file: .doc
Special (Invited) Session: Virtual Conversations and Academic Performance´s Students
Organizer of the Session: 626-178.doc
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