earticle

영어

The objective of this study is to identify the impacts of communication reinforcement on performance of learning in Web-PBL. Communication reinforcement is defined as the combination of information sharing and co-construction. As factors facilitating communication reinforcement, we propose learner's characteristics, task characteristics, and group characteristics. Learner's characteristics are collaboration-orientation, openness, holistic approach, and online community-orientation which reflects e-learning environment. Collaboration-oriented tasks as group projects were developed and given to groups with 5-6 members. The group characteristics are categorized into 'horizontal' and 'vertical', according to the patterns of communication between a group leader and members. To verify empirically the proposed research model, an experimental design was performed to learners who took on-line and off-line courses with group projects. We found important results as follows; First, field dependence has positive impacts on information sharing, and online community-orientation has positive impacts on co-construction. These results correspond with prior studies on relationship between field dependence and collaborative learning. Second, collaboration-oriented task directly impacts on information sharing, and indirectly affects co-construction, This result implicates that information sharing is pre-requisite of co-construction. Third, 'horizontal' was identified as a factor giving positive effects on information sharing and co-construction. This result implies that horizontal communication is very important to facilitate communication reinforcement.