A Study on Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning in Statistics Classroom

Information Technology (IT) as a vehicle for transmitting knowledge to students and/or individualising learning to suit each student's learning needs or pace is only of partial relevance to the role of IT in education. IT may also organise an environment that engages students in collaborative learning but how peer collaboration fostered within an IT environment is not clearly known. Therefore, this paper aims to address the research question, "How do students perceive the learning activities taking place in an IT environment?". Data were gathered from a questionnaire based survey through personal interviews of all fifty-eight students enrolling in Year 2 of the Higher Diploma in Applied Statistics and Computing (HDASC) course in the Hong Kong Institute of Vocational Education. This cohort of HDASC students was selected because Regression Modelling is a module taught in their Year 2 study in which web resources and Excel were utilised with an emphasis on social processes of learning. The results of the survey indicated that most students held positive perceptions of learning with IT associated with productive social interactions with their learning partners. They found their interaction with their partners collaborative and their communication beneficial to learning as it enabled them to verbalise their thoughts to sustain task-centred discussion.