Relationships between Listening and Speaking in Online Discussions: An Empirical Investigation

Abstract

This study investigated relationships between how students "listen" (access existing posts) and "speak" (contribute posts) in asynchronous online discussions. Ten variables indexing four dimensions of students' listening (breadth, depth, temporal contiguity and revisitation) and five variables indexing three dimensions of students' speaking (discursiveness, depth of content and reflectivity) were calculated for 31 students participating in six week-long online discussions as part of an undergraduate educational psychology course. Multi-level mixed-model linear regressions indicated that responsiveness of students' posts was positively predicted by how often they revisited previously read peer posts, and negatively related to a greater number of posts in the discussion overall. Post content quality was predicted by the percentage of posts viewed that students actually read (as opposed to scan). Put together, results suggest that when students take the time to read and re-read their peers' posts there are related benefits in the quality of the posts they contribute.