Determining Relations Between Core Dimenisons of Collaboration Quality: A Multidimensional Scaling Approach

Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) constitutes one of the most extensively developed paradigms of research and practice in intelligent networking and collaborative systems technology. Interdisciplinarity in the research field involves the application of several methodological approaches towards analysis of CSCL that range from deep-level qualitative analyses of small interaction-rich episodes of collaboration, to quantitative measures of suitably categorized events of interaction that are used as indicators of the success of collaboration in some of its facets. This article adopts an alternative approach to CSCL analysis that aims at taking advantage of some desired properties of each of these diverse methodological trends, involving the use of a rating scheme for the assessment of collaboration quality. After defining a set of dimensions that cover the most important aspects of collaboration, it employs appropriately trained human agents to assign ratings of collaboration quality to each dimension, basing their assessments on substantial aspects of collaboration that are not easily formalisable. The activities studied here regard 228 collaborating dyads, working synchronously on a computer science problem-solving task with the use of the Synergo tool. Based on this large dataset, relations between dimensions of collaboration quality are unraveled on empirical grounds, based on the ratings of collaboration quality that were elaborated statistically using a multidimensional scaling technique. Results obtained are in accordance with the initial design of the rating scheme used, and further particularize the relations between the dimensions it defines.