Analysing a collaborative writing activity in order to improve tutor’s

perception of individual contributions of learners

Christelle Laperrousaz, Pascal Leroux & Philippe Teutsch

Laboratoire d'Informatique de l'Université du Maine - CNRS FRE 2730
University of Le Mans, France
{Christelle.Laperrousaz,Pascal.Leroux, Philippe.Teutsch}@lium.univ-lemans.fr

Abstract 2. Collaborative writing activity

This paper is interesting in the tutor’s perception of
the learner’s contribution to a collective work. In
particular, we propose means of individual perception
of a collaborative writing activity. We present what a
collaborative writing activity is and what the tutor’s
needs of perception are in order to follow a
collaborative writing activity. Then, we present our
propositions of perception of individual contribution
through the analysis of discussions.
1. Introduction
During the follow-up of a distance collective
activity, the tutor needs to understand directly the
learner’s individual progression, in order to support
each learner in the collective task. The success or the
failure of a collective work is evaluated from the
contribution of individuals to the elaboration of the
common task [1]. To evaluate the learner’s
contribution, the tutor has to recognize each learner in
the final collaborative production. For that, s/he needs
some tools which help him/her perceive each learner’s
activity as clearly as possible. We propose that the
tutor’s perception of the learner’s activity be possible
through the consultation of the learner’s individual
productions, the consultation of his/her contribution to
the discussions and collective productions and through
the visualization of his/her place in the group
dynamics. Our context of work is the collaborative
writing in French as a Foreign Language field. So, we
take an interest in describing how to perceive
individual contribution to a collaborative writing
activity. First, we describe what a collaborative writing
activity is, and what the tutor’s needs to perceive each
learner’s contributions are. Then, we present our
propositions to analyse the learner’s contributions.
2.1. Common tasks of collaborative writing
T. Cerratto [1] proposes two main tasks of
collaborative writing: the planning of collaboration and
the production of the collaborative document. The
planning of collaboration is composed of discussions
about the agreement of the goal, the tasks’ division
(choice of the writing strategy, and assignment of roles
to group members), the planning of synchronous or
asynchronous meetings. Producing the collaborative
document involves making the plan of the document
(proposition and structuring of individual and group
ideas), writing the document and reviewing it. So,
exchanges between group members concern planning,
writing and checking of the content.
2.2. Writing strategies
Four writing strategies can be envisaged [2]. Group
single-author writing strategy occurs when one
member is directed to write for the group: this strategy
is used when consensus on the written document is not
very important and when the writing task is simple.
Sequential single writing occurs when one member
writes at a given time: each writer completes his/her
part of document and then passes it to the next writer.
This strategy simplifies the organization but can create
a lack of consensus and implies frequent controls of the
content. Parallel writing occurs when the production is
divided into different parts and when members write in
parallel: each participant is responsible for a part.
Reactive writing occurs when members write the
document together, reacting and commenting to each
other.
The strategy can be imposed by the tutor or by the
collaborative tool, or chosen by the group.

Proceedings of the Fifth IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies (ICALT’05)
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 2.3. Roles of learners
Learners can play various roles during the
collaborative writing. The writer [2] is responsible of
the translating of ideas from discussion to a part of the
collaborative document. The consultant participates
actively during the writing stages but has no
responsibility for the content production. The editor is
responsible for the overall content production; s/he
provides corrections to document parts of other group
members. The reviewer comments the collaborative
document, on both the content and the form: the writer
accepts or not these comments. The group leader fully
participates in authorship and reviewing activity, but
also leads the group, responsible of the planning
management, and encouraging learners’ motivation.
The facilitator is external to the collaborative writing;
s/he does not give content feedback: for us, this person
is the tutor of the group. Roles can change during the
collective activity. They can be proposed by the tutor,
or distributed by the group among group members. In
each case, it can be interesting to provide the tutor with
information about the role of each learner, exploring
the discussion. With such information, the tutor would
be able to check if a learner plays the role s/he has
assigned to him/her. Moreover, s/he would be able to
encourage a learner to play a specific role.
2.4. Tutor’s needs and tools
In order to perceive the learner’s contribution in the
group work and to evaluate it, the tutor needs to
understand the collaborative writing process and the
learner’s place in it. In particular, s/he needs to know
the role(s) played by the learner during discussions and
productions. The tutor’s needs are dependant on the
roles s/he plays to follow the activity, on the writing
strategy, on the stage of the collaborative process, and
on the collaborative writing environment used by the
group. S/he needs information about the group
coordination (writing strategy, role distribution,
planning), and about the group production (plan of the
document, individual and collective ideas, comments).
Currently, the tutor does not have a lot of analysis
tools to facilitate him/her in his/her task of perception.
The literature presents works about quantitative and
qualitative analysis of the contributions made by the
learners during the collective production. Works of [3]
present a tool of analysis of the group. First, a
quantitative analysis concerns the learner’s
contributions during a discussion (using a sentence-
opener discussion tool): evolution of the number of
contributions, contribution size and number of
contributions answered by other members. Second, a
Proceedings of the Fifth IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies (ICALT’05)
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qualitative analysis concerns the analysis of individual
learner’s behaviours compared to the rest of the group
members. Other works combine quantitative analysis
of interactions with learners’ impressions about the
collaborative process and the collaborative production
[4] to better understand the collaborative process.
We propose to analyze discussions from an
individual point of view, categorizing the learner’s
interventions and identifying the learner’s roles. We
present our proposals in the next section.
3. Analysis of the learner’s contributions
From the literature, we have noted that most of the
collaborative writing environments allow the group to
adopt a parallel writing strategy [4] [5] [6], so, in the
rest of the paper, we restrict our study to collaborative
writing activity whose writing strategy is parallel. In
such a writing strategy, most part of the collective
work is made during discussions: analysing the
learner’s contributions implies analysing discussions
from an individual point of view. Discussions can be
seen as a shared understanding of the task to be carried
out and of the current activity. During collaborative
writing, exchanges between co-authors are both means
and products of the collaboration in the document
writing [7]. Each individual contribution is subjected to
the judgement of others that arouses approval, reject or
a counterproposal [8]. The tutor has also to take this
judgement into account in order to evaluate the
learner’s contributions. We think that exchanges
constitute a relevant trace to understand the
collaborative writing process, and we propose to
analyze both the learner’s interventions and the
reactions of others. To facilitate the identification of
communicative acts, we base our analysis on tools of
discussion semi-structured by communicative acts.
3.1. Analysis of the learner’s interventions
One of the difficult things but interesting for the
tutor is to characterize learners’ interventions (relating
to the writing task or relating to the interaction for
example). Cognitive sciences propose manual
categorizations of interventions in discussion. T.
Cerratto [1] identifies three categories: interventions
about action, about the content and about the artefact.
Interventions about action are composed of initiative
interventions about the way of writing the collaborative
document. Interventions about the content are
composed of initiative interventions about what to
write. Interventions about the artefact are composed of
initiative interventions about functionalities of the
 collaborative environment. M. Quignard [8] envisages
two types of interventions: epistemic interventions
which introduce new knowledge elements, axiological
interventions which express a judgement or a problem
evaluation. In particular, he proposes a collaborative
model of argumentation, analyzing an intervention
through three criteria: its universe of reference (the
problem-solving task versus the dialogue structure), its
critical thinking operation (an evaluation versus a
making explicit), and its interlocutory orientation. At
any time, a learner can contribute to the main problem
or to the dialogue control.
We think that it is interesting to provide the tutor
with an automatic classification of the learner’s
exchanges in order to help him read the discussion. We
propose to distinguish interventions relating to the
writing task and interventions relating to interaction. In
each category, we propose to identify propositions,
evaluations, and explanations. Moreover, we propose
to characterize exchanges as minimal or complete. A
minimal exchange is composed of an initiative
intervention and a reactive intervention. A complete
exchange is composed of an initiative intervention, a
reactive intervention and an evaluative intervention.
Complete exchanges characterize a more important
undertaking of the learner who initiates them [6]. So,
distinguishing minimal and complete exchange is a
means for the tutor to evaluate the learner’s
undertaking.
3.2. Analysis of the learner’s roles
Another type of useful information for the tutor is
the learner’s roles, analysing discussions. To identify
the learner’s role, we propose to base our work on the
ethology work of Pléty [9] who has analyzed
interactions of schoolchildren working in groups of
four to solve algebraic problems and has highlighted
four social behaviour profiles according to the learner’s
volume of intervention, to the learner’s type of
intervention, to the learner’s communicative gestures
and to the reactions of the other learners. The four
social behaviours are the Moderator, the Seeker, the
Valuator and the Independent. From this ethology
work, a first computer study has been done by George
and Leroux [10] who have developed a tool which
makes it possible to perceive learners’ social
behaviours during collective discussions semi-
structured by communicative acts. Analysis is
graphically represented. In order to calculate the
behaviour profiles, the tool we propose glances
through the collective discussion and for each
intervention, keeps in memory the speaker’s name, the
communicative act, and the reaction of others to this
intervention. For each reaction, the tool keeps in
Proceedings of the Fifth IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies (ICALT’05)
0-7695-2338-2/05 $20.00 © 2005 IEEE
memory the speaker’s name and the communicative
act. Depending on the communicative act used, the tool
enriches one of the behaviour profiles of the learner
who has intervened. The tutor has various kinds of
views at his/her disposal: visualization of the
behaviour profile rates during one collective
discussion, visualization of the evolution of the rate of
behaviour profiles as the collective discussions go on.
4. Conclusion and future work
We have presented what a collaborative writing
activity is and how to improve the tutor’s perception of
each learner’s contribution. We have proposed several
analyses of discussions in order to highlight individual
contribution to a collaborative writing document,
especially when the writing strategy is parallel.
Currently, we are developing an environment which
will integrate all our propositions of perception.
5. References
[1] Cerratto, T. (1999). “Activité Collaborative sur Réseau,
Une approche instrumentale de l'écriture en collaboration”.
Thèse de doctorat, Université Paris VIII, France.
[2] Lowry, P. B., Curtis, A., Lowry, M. R, (2004), “Building
a taxonomy and nomenclature of collaborative writing to
improve interdisciplinary research and practice”, Journal of
Business Communication, 41(1), pp. 66-99.
[3] Barros, B., Verdejo, M. F. (2000), “Analysing student
interaction processes in order to improve collaboration, The
DEGREE approach”, International Journal of Artificial
Intelligence in Education, 11, pp. 221-241.
[4] Santoro, F. M., Borges, M. R. S., Santos, N. (2004),
“Evaluation of collaborative learning processes”, Advanced
Technology for learning, 1(3), pp. 164-173.
[5] Hofte, G. H., Van Der Lugt, H. J. (1997). “CoCoDoc: a
framework for collaborative compound document editing
based on OpenDoc and CORBA”, IFIP/IEE International
Conference on Open Distributed Processing and Distributed
Platforms, Toronto, Canada, pp. 15-33.
[6] Rodriguez, H., Severinson-Eklundh, K. (2002),
“Supporting individual views and mutual awareness in a
collaborative writing task: the case of Col-laboració”,
Technical report TRITA-NA-P0214, NADA.
[7] Sharples, M. (1993), “Introduction”, In Computer
Supported Collaborative Writing (Springer-Verlag), pp. 1-7.
[8] Quignard, M. (2002), “A Collaborative Model of
Argumentation in Dyadic Problem-Solving Interactions”,
ISSA'02, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
[9] Pléty, R. (1996). L'apprentissage coopérant, Presses
Universitaires de Lyon ed., Lyon, France.
[10] George, S., Leroux, P. (2002), “An approach to
automatic analysis of learners' social behavior during
computer-mediated synchronous conversations”, ITS'02,
Biarritz (France), pp. 630-640.