Face-to-face and chat-room discussions: An exploratory study of students' and instructors' participation

The research site, a higher education philosophy course, offered face-to-face and chat-room sections for students to engage in course discussion. Findings from this exploratory study indicate significant differences in students' and instructors' patterns of participation within and across forums. Comparisons were based on coded transcripts of discussion sessions (using a variant of Felton's coding scheme), participant interviews and responses to questionnaires, and the Keirsey Temperament Sorter instrument (results correlate highly with those from the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator).;Across forums, instructors made proportionately more requests for clarification and more simple informational queries in the chat-room than in the face-to-face forum; and proportionately provided more lengthy utterances and acknowledging statements in the face-to-face forum. Students, on the other hand, proportionately made more simple informational queries and statements of clarification in the chat-room and proportionately contributed more acknowledging statements in the face-to-face forum. Additionally, there were proportionately more statements of agreement and statements extending others' comments in the face-to-face forum than in the chat-room.;Characteristics that distinguished the face-to-face and chat-room forums, derived from participants' points of view, included: physical presence versus lack of, spoken versus written communication, and single versus multiple simultaneous conversational threads. Findings include a qualitative description of benefits and limitations of these characteristics on participants' patterns of participation.;Correlations were examined between students' use of conversational features and scores on four psychological dimensions. Correlations supported participation patterns advanced in empirical literature. Lastly, findings suggested students who strongly preferred to participate in only one of the discussion forums tended to be temperamentally different from each other, as well as different from students willing to participate in both forums.;Within forums, students' and instructors' use of conversational features differed more in the face-to-face forum than in the chat-room, suggesting roles were more distinguishable in the former. In the face-to-face forum students proportionately asked more questions for clarification, and instructors provided proportionately more lengthy comments and statements of clarification. Such differences were not found in the chat-room.;The study's findings inform those seeking to understand benefits and limitations of face-to-face and text-based chat-rooms in an educational setting.