Taking Transactivity Detection to a New Level

Transactivity is a valued collaborative process, which has been associated with elevated learning gains, collaborative product quality, and knowledge transfer within teams. Dynamic forms of collaboration support have made use of real time monitoring of transactivity, and automation of its analysis has been affirmed as valuable to the field. Early models were able to achieve high reliability within restricted domains. More recent approaches have achieved a level of generality across learning domains. In this study, we investigate generalizability of models developed primarily in computer science courses to a new student population, namely, masters students in a leadership course, where we observe strikingly different patterns of transactive exchange than in prior studies. This difference prompted both a reformulation of the coding standards and innovation in the modeling approach, both of which we report on here.