Designing a visualization tool for children to reflect on their collaborative dialogue

Abstract Collaborative learning is an essential part of children’s development, positively impacting academic achievement and fostering higher levels of reasoning. However, young learners often face challenges with taking turns in conversation, openly listening to ideas, and respecting different viewpoints. One way to foster collaborative skills may be to raise children’s awareness of their own collaborative dialogue. In this paper, we present a new interactive visualization application that supports children in reflecting on their collaborative dialogue from a recent prior interaction. The tool analyzes children’s completed dialogue and then presents temporal information about their interaction with their partner. We implemented two studies with 36 seventh grade children who collaboratively completed computing activities. We conducted think-aloud sessions to investigate children’s perceptions, preferences, and expectations of the collaborative dialogue visualizations. The results showed that the dialogue visualizations hold promise for helping children increase their awareness of collaborative dialogue and set their own goals regarding ways they would like to improve.