After my previous post about the use of trace diagrams to analyse collaboration between human agents, I read Joiner R. & Issroff, K. (2003). Tracing success: graphical methods for analysing successful collaborative problem solving. Computers & Education, 41, 4, 369-378.
In this paper, the experiment consisted in a collaborative foraging task in a MOO environment.
The authors went further by combining the visual analysis of trace diagrams with numerical measures: - Task division is calculated by adding the number of rooms that one participant only searched to the number of rooms that the other participant only searched. - Overlap is calculated by counting the number of rooms both partners searched -Backtracking is calculated by adding up the number of times one partner entered a room they had already entered.
They then correlated those number with a performance index. This allowed them to find that there was a significant and negative correlation between task division and number of moves taken(r=-0.72, P<0.05): the greater the task division, the less moves a pair took to solve the problem. There was a significant and positive correlation between overlap and the number of moves (r=0.77, P<0.05): the greater the overlap, the more moves taken to solve the problem. There was a significant positive correlation between backtracking and number of moves (r =0.92, P<0.05): the more backtracking, the greater the number of moves.