JultikaUniversity of Oulu repository

Abstract

Maker culture is a new movement adopted by the educational sector around the world. Such movement aroused the interest of researchers and educators to explore it. Within its environment, students can collaborate with others to solve problems or do some projects. However, collaboration does not occur naturally. From this problem, this research has flourished.

The research design of this study is a case study, following qualitative methodology entitled content analysis. The participants involved are twenty students in their 1st year of master studies. The aim of the current study is to explore collaborative learning in Maker culture to identify three aspects; 1) how it might affect the students’ learning gain, 2) how the participation and collaborative interaction among the students are influenced, 3) how did the students perceive such collaborative script.

The researcher answered these questions by designing a macro collaborative script and implementing it in two separated sessions within the maker culture context. The data collection methods were pre and post-questionnaires in addition to video data and they were analyzed using QSR NVivo software. The findings of this study indicated that the students’ learning gain was significant, yet the majority acquired a shallow level of knowledge and not a deep level of knowledge. As for the participation and collaborative interaction, although the students were on-task almost 57% of the duration of the sessions, interestingly the duration of collaborative interaction was only around 33% of their participation. Hence, it can be deduced that even if the students are participating in a collaborative task that does not mean they are collaboratively interacting; the reasons that might be behind such results are elaborated comprehensively in the study. Finally, the students had a positive attitude towards this type of collaboration script. The researcher recommends that collaborative interaction might be enhanced if the script was adaptive with more details, this might lead to a deeper level in cognitive learning gain and a higher percentage in collaborative interactions.