What Brings Students Together?: Investigating the Causal Relationship Between Joint Mental Effort and Joint Visual Attention

Abstract

Computer-supported collaborative learning has a long history of increasing our understanding of the collaborative process and what fruitful collaborative actions entail. Often, we study the correlational relationships between collaborative process variables but investigating causal relationships may deepen our understanding of the collaboration process by highlighting the nature of the relationship between different collaborative behaviors. In this paper, we examine causal relations between joint mental effort and joint visual attention using Granger’s definition of causality. We apply this analysis to dual eye-tracking data from 41 dyads collaborating to create a concept map. The results show that for high-performing dyads, joint mental effort causes joint visual attention and power of the causal relation changes with different division of labor episodes (i.e., role-based, task-based, concurrent). No causality can be claimed for low-performing dyads. We discuss how our results can support our understanding of the cognitive processes students use during the collaboration process.