Application Of Human Factors Engineering Principles To The Development Of Social Network Analysis (SNA) Assessment Tools For Use By Teachers Within A Collaborative Educational Environment

There is an untapped opportunity for the use of social network analysis (SNA) in the field of computer supported collaborative learning (CSCL). This educational issue led to this thesis, an exploratory study, which involved a system analysis for the assessment of student collaboration and social interactions within classrooms. System analysis techniques, such as Monte-Carlo simulations, yielded significant findings on classroom size and the effect of missing data on SNA that provided a foundation to conduct a robust analysis of students' social interactions.;A teacher questionnaire was designed that generated design requirements with respect to teachers' needs to understand student collaboration. Teachers strongly advocated the need to understand social measures about students through visualizations, showing student clusters as well as lone students. Teachers also wanted to recognize analytics about a student's popularity and influence in the classroom as well as the value derived from students' work in the collaborative workspace.;Consequently, an experiment was designed and conducted on students within Interactive Learning and Collaborative Environment (InterLACE) that identified several social constructs and factor scores that can provide teachers with two predictive models allowing teachers to account for at least 60% of the variance in student performance.;A deeper understanding of these factors and the teacher questionnaire resulted in an early stage SNA assessment tool where through identifying these factor scores and associated visualizations the teacher could better predict student performance.