Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
restriction on the number of times they could move each piece of furniture. The instructions
were given both verbally and in written form.
Participants were allowed to try the application for a while before starting the task in order
to get comfortable with its functionality. The time to accomplish the task was restricted to 15
minutes. Sessions were audio recorded.
Data
. Every student intervention within the environment was recorded in a text log file. The
logs content is the user identification; the type of action , i.e. move furniture, point furniture,
a change in the point of view of the environment, when speaking to others; and the time the
intervention was made in minutes and seconds. Data was manipulated to identify
discussion periods and the session stages.
Discussion periods
Discussion periods are important in a collaborative session because when they occur,
planes, evaluation and agreements are settled. A number of talking-turns involving most of
the group members seems to be an appropriate method for distinguishing them from
situations like a simple question-answer interchange, or the statements people working in a
group produce alongside their action directed to no one in particular (Heath et al., 1995).
A talking turn, as defined by Jaffe and Feldstein (1970), begins when a person starts to speak
alone, and it is kept while nobody else interrupts him/her. For practical effects, in a
computer environment with written text communication, the talking turn can be understood
as a posted message, and in oral communication as a vocalization.
Discussion periods for these trials were established as when each one of the three group
members had at least one talking-turn. Because for automatic speech recognition the end of
an utterance is usually measured when a silence pause occurs in the range of 500 to 2000 ms
(Brdiczka, Maisonnasse, & Reignier, 2005), and the answer to a question usually goes in a
smaller range, around 500 ms (A. Johnson & Leigh, 2001); to determine the end of a
discussion period, pauses of silences were considered in the range of three seconds.
Initial-Planning-Implementation-Reviewing stages
The collaborative stages can be established by nonverbal cues in different ways, although it
also has to relay on the specifications of the task and the instructor strategy for the session.
For example, the initial phase could be the introduction to the problem within the
environment.
In this case, because the task was explained in person, instruction were delivered to
participants in written paper and they had an initial session to try the application, the initial
stage was expected to be brief, more likely to be used to get the initiative to start. Then, the
Planning stage was expected to start almost immediately; to identify it, the first discussion
period was used.
The restrictions posted for the objects manipulation makes to expect that participants will
not move objects if they have no implementation intention; therefore, the initiation of the
stage was determined with the first movement of an object.
Once the group starts to implement, the discussions periods should mean that they are
making new plans or changing them, because there is no way to differentiate new plans
