Collaborative writing: too much of a good thing? Exploring engineering students’ perceptions using the Repertory Grid

Abstract

Students' perceptions of technology-supported collaborative writing (CW) and peer reviewing are important because these perceptions affect adoption decisions, initial engagement, and continued reliance on collaboration/peer feedback as a learning resource. This paper describes and demonstrates the utility of the Repertory Grid Technique to probe such perceptions. Combining interviews and written surveys, this study uncovered constructs that engineering students' use to think about CW/peer-reviewing, and interesting patterns of relations among those constructs. For instance, while students perceived activities that involve the construction of personal arguments (such as CW) to be exciting and effective for learning, they also judged such activities to be time-consuming and stressful. This study also found interesting differences in the construct systems of high- and low-performing students.