Virtual learning environments are proliferating, yet the social interactions between learners in these contexts remain challenging. Cues (such as gestures) that facilitate reading other people in face-to-face contexts are absent in many virtual environments. However, these contexts can endow participants with communicative capabilities that are not possible face-to-face. Because social interactions and relationships are pivotal to an array of outcomes, we need to facilitate interpersonal communication in these contexts.
This research will conduct four experiments to capitalize on the affordances of computer mediated learning environments to improve the relationships participants from within them. These experiments will examine undergraduate and middle-school learners who are learning about complex causality within ecosystems. In each study, relationships between learners will be improved through transformed social interactions, an approach in which participants are endowed with capabilities for navigating their social world that humans do not normally possess. Specifically, participants will be able to take the perspective of other participants and to increase their similarity to other participants.
Intellectual Merit. This study makes important intellectual contributions through experimentally testing ways to improve learners' relationships, examining the impact of these interventions on learning and motivation (and affective outcomes), and advancing the state of the art in non-verbal signals in computer-mediated communication.
Potential Broader Impacts. Because of the proliferation of online learning communities, the capacity for these environments to involve a diverse cross-section of students, and the novel, widely-replicable, computational approach, these studies may have broad impact across the fields of education, communications, and computer science.
Our project has made a number of substantial contributions – some of which have enhanced our scientific understanding of important phenomena and some of which have important implications for applied settings. One set of intellectual contributions comes from our studies of negotiation in a virtual environment and centers around our understanding of different types of social perspective taking and their differential effects on outcomes. One of the unique advantages of virtual environments, is that they allow participants to take the perspective of others by virtually "walking around in the shoes" of a different character who holds a different point of view. Through manipulating the type of social perspective taking that participants engaged in, we found that social perspective taking fostered a greater capacity to compromise among participants and improved their perceptions of their relationship with their negotiation partner. Importantly, these effects were strongest when participants engaged in rich, experiential learning about the point of view of the other party (as opposed to merely receiving information about the other party’s point of view or being told to take the other party’s perspective without receiving information about the content of that perspective). A second set of intellectual contributions comes from our investigation of similarity as a lever to improve teacher-student relationships in a high school. This study has made a methodological contribution to similarity research by demonstrating that perceptions of real similarities can be experimentally manipulated in the context of a field experiment. This moves the field beyond reliance on either correlational studies using real similarities in the real world or experiments using fake similarities in laboratory settings. The study also offers compelling evidence of a causal association between real similarities and improvements in real-world relationships. A third way in which this project has demonstrated intellectual merit is by providing theoretical and methodological advances on the relationship between nonverbal behavior and mental states. For decades, social scientists have been studying the way body movements provide clues about the mind. This project developed a computational tool to gather large amounts of objective data, and by doing so provided theoretical advances in interactional synchrony, attention and learning, and engagement in media. In addition to these scientific contributions, this project has the potential to have several broader impacts on schools in particular and society more broadly. The negotiation studies spawned the creation of a novel virtual environment (a school) where the focus is to help teach students how to improve their social perspective taking capacities in the context of a bullying simulation. This bullying environment represents a promising way to train students to improve their social perspective taking capacity and provides a vehicle through which schools can begin to mitigate bullying behaviors in their schools. The potential for the similarity study to have a broader impact in our educational system is particularly promising. This intervention is easily scalable and could be deployed to thousands of schools. We are in the process of replicating the findings first and, pending those results, we will adapt the main intervention (a get-to-know-you survey) for teachers to use in their classes with their students. Given that the intervention, closed the achievement gap in course grades between White and Asian students and their historically underserved peers by 65%, we are hopeful that this research might lead to an important tool to promote more equitable opportunities for students in our schools. The technology underlying the gesture and synchrony studies is likely to be tremendously useful in its applications to education. For any system that employs online learning, such as MOOCs, we can now utilize the gesture tracking algorithms as a student learns in real-time. Then, the instruction can be dynamically tailored to learners. Given it is free to copy digital materials, one can imagine a course which is broadcast all over the world, and is transformed differentially to each learner simultaneously, changing scope, speed, etc. as a function of her or his body movements (which would be detected by a webcam).
