Gender Differences in Upper Elementary Students' Regulation of Learning while Pair Programming

2020 
Collaborative learning has demonstrated benefits for girls in computer science [7] and this may be a way to help address the gender gap in CS. Research indicates that while collaborating, boys often express more individualistic ideas whereas girls tend to be more supportive [1]. It is important for students to regulate their learning in collaborative learning environments because they need to negotiate group goals and diverse approaches to the task [3], and the use of open-ended tasks with multiple solution paths are common [4]. There is minimal research in CS education on regulation of learning (e.g., [5,6,]). Co-regulated learning is the process in which an other helps regulate the learning of a student [2] self such as by asking questions that prompt the student to monitor and evaluate (e.g., "What do you already know about 'if' blocks that would help here?''). In this way, thinking and reasoning through the problem is shared by the group members [2] self. Our work lies in the context of upper elementary students pair programming. We investigated how four 5th grade dyads differentially regulated their learning and explored the co-occurrence of students' coded discourse by gender. Initial findings indicate that boys monitored their learning and engaged in individualistic, disagreement, and collaborative-coded statements. Girls engaged in all three components of the regulation cycle, while offering collaborative, disagreement, confusion, and tutoring-coded statements. Confusion was often expressed as not understanding the partner or the task such as "Wait! What are you talking about?'' Individualistic utterances reflect no clear attempt to involve the partner, such as "You can trust me to handle it.'' Both occur far more than desired for collaborative work. Our findings can be used to inform the personalization of human and AI support in ways that will help both groups of students co-regulate and reduce the gender gap in computer science.
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