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CheerOn: Facilitating Online Social Support for Novice Project-Based Learning Teams

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Novices learn innovation best through project-based learning (PBL), working in face-to-face teams to tackle real-world problems. Yet, real-world projects are complex, stressful, and especially challenging for novices. Online communities could provide social support to motivate novices, but it is unclear how to design online communities to support face-to-face PBL teams. Here we ask: How might we design an online system that enlists external supporters to provide online social support to motivate PBL students? Our need-finding study found that PBL students received infrequent social support, rarely engaged in help-seeking, and perceived little progress until the end of their projects. Based on these findings, we designed CheerOn, an online social support system that prompts novice student teams to externalize progress allowing external, online supporters to offer social support. We tested CheerOn with 3 PBL teams and 15 external supporters over a 6-week course. We found that external supporters provided instrumental, informational, and emotional support that strengthened students’ bonds to the community, which increased help-seeking. Supporters also provided appraisal support, which increased students’ perceived value of their work. Supporters were more likely to offer informational and instrumental support when they were promoted or saw a clear need for help; supporters who received gratitude from students were more likely to offer emotional support in return; and supporters who were closely connected to the community were more likely to offer appraisal and instrumental support. Theoretically, this research contributes to our understanding of how hybrid face-to-face and online communities can impact the behavior of PBL students, specifically towards the facilitation of help-seeking behavior, as well as increased understanding of how different types of social support (i.e., appraisal, emotional, informational, and instrumental) can impact the participation of PBL students and supporters. Practically, this research contributes to our understanding of how to design socio-technical systems that facilitate social support for offline novice PBL students working, expanding the instructional resources available for preparing novices in PBL environments.
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CheerOn: Facilitating Online Social Support for Novice
Project-Based Learning Teams
EMILY HARBURG, DANIEL REES LEWIS, MATTHEW EASTERDAY, and
ELIZABETH M. GERBER, Northwestern University
Novices learn innovation best through project-based learning (PBL), working in face-to-face teams to tackle
real-world problems. Yet, real-world projects are complex, stressful, and especially challenging for novices.
Online communities could provide social support to motivate novices, but it is unclear how to design online
communities to support face-to-face PBL teams. Here we ask: How might we design an online system that
enlists external supporters to provide online social support to motivate PBL students? Our need-nding study
found that PBL students received infrequent social support, rarely engaged in help-seeking, and perceived
little progress until the end of their projects. Based on these ndings, we designed CheerOn, an online social
support system that prompts novice student teams to externalize progress allowing external, online support-
ers to oer social support. We tested CheerOn with 3 PBL teams and 15 external supporters over a 6-week
course. We found that external supporters provided instrumental, informational, and emotional support that
strengthened students’ bonds to the community, which increased help-seeking. Supporters also provided ap-
praisal support, which increased students’ perceived value of their work. Supporters were more likely to oer
informational and instrumental support when they were promoted or saw a clear need for help; supporters
who received gratitude from students were more likely to oer emotional support in return; and supporters
who were closely connected to the community were more likely to oer appraisal and instrumental support.
Theoretically, this research contributes to our understanding of how hybrid face-to-face and online commu-
nities can impact the behavior of PBL students, specically towards the facilitation of help-seeking behavior,
as well as increased understanding of how dierent types of social support (i.e., appraisal, emotional, infor-
mational, and instrumental) can impact the participation of PBL students and supporters. Practically, this
research contributes to our understanding of how to design socio-technical systems that facilitate social sup-
port for oine novice PBL students working, expanding the instructional resources available for preparing
novices in PBL environments.
CCS Concepts: • Human-centered computing Collaborative and social computing;Collaborative and
social computing systems and tools;Social networking sites;
Additional Key Words and Phrases: Social support, self-ecacy, student motivation, progress, project-based
learning, teams, online communities, computer supported cooperative work
This is work is supported by the National Science Foundation, under Awards number 1530833; 1530837; 1623635
Authors’ addresses: E. Harburg, D. R. Lewis, M. Easterday, and E. M. Gerber, Northwestern University, 2133 Sheridan Rd,
Evanston, IL 60208 USA.
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© 2018 Association for Computing Machinery.
1073-0516/2018/12-ART32 $15.00
https://doi.org/10.1145/3241043
ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, Vol. 25, No. 6, Article 32. Publication date: December 2018.
32:2 E. Harburg et al.
ACM Reference format:
Emily Harburg, Daniel Rees Lewis, Matthew Easterday, and Elizabeth M. Gerber. 2018. CheerOn: Facilitating
Online Social Support for Novice Project-Based Learning Teams. ACM Trans. Comput.-Hum. Interact. 25, 6,
Article 32 (December 2018), 46 pages.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3241043
1 INTRODUCTION
Solving societal problems, such as climate change, poverty, and illiteracy, requires innovators –
people who discover, evaluate, and exploit new opportunities (West and Farr 1990). Innovators
create products that promote economic growth, job creation, and positive social impact (Wong et al.
2005). To develop future innovators, project-based learning (PBL) communities engage novices
with authentic (Merriënboer et al. 2010), real-world project-based work (Krajcik and Czerniak
2013; Shaer and Resnick 1999).
Yet authentic PBL work can be dicult for novices due to the complex and uncertain nature of
the work (Blumenfeld et al. 1991; Krajcik and Czerniak 2013), especially in the context of innova-
tion work that is inherently uncertain (Scott and Bruce 1994). To succeed, PBL students must have
sucient self-ecacy, dened as the perceived ability to achieve the associated tasks (Bandura
1986), to persist in the face of complex innovation challenges (Shalley et al. 2004). Yet, similar to
professional innovators, novice PBL students may experience low self-ecacy when discovering,
evaluating, or exploiting new opportunities (Lande and Leifer 2010,p.8),whichdecreasestheir
persistence and progress (Lande and Leifer 2010).
Novices, by denition, lack the mastery of innovation work that provides a basis for self-ecacy.
However, it is possible to boost novices’ self-ecacy, or one’s perception of their own ability to
achieve a task (Bandura 1981; Staples and Higgins 1998), by providing social support (Bandura
1997). Although social support has been dened in many ways (Heaney and Israel 2008), here
we dene social support as receiving emotional, instrumental, informational, or appraisal support
from others (House 1981). Social support can increase self-ecacy, which leads to increased persis-
tence and ultimately progress (Bandura 1982; Stapeles and Higgins 1998). Social support can create
positive emotional experiences that reduce stress (Pearlin et al. 1981), allowing novice innovators
to persist despite their inexperience (Blumenfeld et al. 1991). Furthermore, social support enhances
motivation to seek help and take risks (Deci and Ryan 2011), skills that novice PBL students may
lack (Blumenfeld et al. 1991; Krajcik and Czerniak 2013) but are necessary for innovation work.
Unfortunately, in PBL settings, instructors may have diculty providing adequate social sup-
port because they are overwhelmed by the many responsibilities of managing multiple students
working on dierent projects, helping students deal with complexity and ambiguity in their
work, and competing course preparation responsibilities (Blumenfeld et al. 1991; Dillenbourg and
Jermann 2010). This research intends to utilize online communities to provide social support for
PBL environments.
Researchers in human computer interaction (HCI) have begun to explore the promise of on-
line communities, such as Behance (www.behance.net; Cochrane and Atoczak 2015)andRed-
dit (Reddit 2017; Bergstrom 2011), to provide social support to motivate novices (Hui et al.
2014). Research suggests that social support given in online communities can help participants,
particularly novices, feel greater control and more empowered (Barak et al. 2008;vanUden-
Kraan et al. 2008). Participation in online support groups can positively inuence one’s psy-
chological state (Barak et al. 2008; Seckin 2011). Some online learning communities like the
MOOSE community (Mooseworld 2017) allow students to support one another’s progress and
give each other social support (Bruckman 2006). Online communities oer the ability to draw
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CheerOn: Facilitating Online Social Support for Novice Project-Based Learning Teams 32:3
on an audience of diverse mentors that may radically expand the instructional resources and so-
cial support available to PBL environments, oering a better way to prepare novice innovators
(Zitter and Hoeve 2012). As online communities become more widely used for learning, engage-
ment, and behavior change (Kizilcec and Schneider 2015; Prochaska et al. 2008; Subrahmanyam
et al. 2008), they oer new possibilities for providing support for PBL students.
However, PBL is inherently a face-to-face group activity – PBL cannot be carried out completely
online because it requires a great deal of face-to-face discussion, feedback, and teamwork (Dym
et al. 2005). Even if PBL work could be done completely online, that would not mirror the real-
world, face-to-face practices of innovation work that students are attempting to learn. But if online-
only communities are not appropriate for PBL work, we might instead be able to design blended
learning environments that integrate both oine and online interaction (So and Brush 2008; Zitter
and Hoeve 2012). In other non-PBL contexts, blended learning environments have been shown to
increase persistence and progress more than traditional face-to-face instruction alone (Lovett et al.
2008; Scheines et al. 2005). So, utilizing online communities to support blended PBL environments
could help to alleviate some of the burden on PBL instructors to support motivation, risk-taking,
and inquiry of students (Blumenfeld et al. 1991; Krajcik and Czerniak 2013). While we know that
social support can help aid workers in an online context (Harburg et al. 2015), we know little about
how online social support might support PBL learners in a blended learning environment.
In this design-based research initiative (Easterday et al. 2017; Easterday et al. 2016; Easterday
et al. 2014), we conducted two studies to build our understanding of how blended online commu-
nities can provide social support in PBL environments. An initial need-nding analysis revealed
how novice PBL students currently receive social support and sustain persistence dened as goal-
directed behavior that is instigated and sustained (Pintrich and Schunk 1996, p. 5). Based on these
ndings, we developed an online support tool, CheerOn, to facilitate external supporters to pro-
vide social support to PBL student teams. Through a 6-week deployment, in a PBL environment
with 3 PBL teams (12 students), we collected interviews, log data, and observations to examine the
eects of online social support on the motivation and progress of project teams, or making con-
crete actions towards a goal (Amabile and Kramer 2011) in this case project completion. We also
interviewed supporters, or individuals giving online social support to students within the online
community, as well as peer instructors, to understand what factors inuenced their participation
in support-giving within the online community.
Our studies asked:
1. Do students in PBL communities receive sucient social support to build their self-ecacy,
impacting their persistence and ultimately their progress in their project work?
2. How might we design a technical system that initiates externalizing team’s progress prompt
social support and how does this in turn motivate students to make progress?
This research contributes to the elds of HCI, computer supported cooperative learning (CSCL),
social psychology, and learning sciences by increasing our understanding of how PBL instructors
can use blended online communities to provide social support to PBL student teams. Specically,
it extends our theoretical understanding of how online communities can provide social support
for oine project work to promote novice innovators’ self-ecacy and help-seeking and how to
motivate external supporters to provide social support. The potential practical benets include
new online platforms that leverage online communities to greatly expand instructional resources
available in PBL environments, oering new ways to better prepare novice innovators. The general
approach may also be extended to support a wide variety of learners – from novice professionals,
entrepreneurs in co-working or makerspaces, to students in Massive Open Online Communities
(MOOCs).
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32:4 E. Harburg et al.
Fig. 1. Social support from instructors in the form of appraisal, emotional, informational, or instrumental
support can increase self-eicacy. Furthermore, help-seeking can prompt the oering of informational and
instrumental support, which can impact self-eicacy. This increased self-eicacy can impact persistence,
which can lead to increased progress. An increased sense of progress can help to build self-eicacy.
2 RELATED WORK
We ground our study in prior research from HCI, CSCL, learning sciences, and social psychology
to better understand how receiving online social support from external supporters in an online
community can inuence the persistence of PBL students working in blended learning environ-
ments.
Innovative design work is complex and challenging yet critical to social progress (Jonassen and
Hung 2008;Mowery2004). PBL environments that challenge students to design innovative solu-
tions to real-world problems can provide critical training but can be equally dicult, as students
often fail to persist (Lande and Leifer 2010; Blumenfeld et al. 2006). The challenging nature of
complex, ambiguous PBL work often creates learning situations in which learners’ self-ecacy is
low.
Instructors and explicit help-seeking provides social support PBL that aids students’ progress
(see Figure 1). Instructors may provide dierent kinds of social support to students to boost self-
ecacy, leading to increased persistence and progress, which in turn should increase self-ecacy.
Explicit help-seeking by students also provides another mechanism for securing social support,
particularly instrumental and informational support (House 1981), leading to greater progress.
While social support is critical for building student persistence, PBL instructors often lack time
to provide sucient social support given their need to manage multiple student projects and play
multiple roles in the classroom (Krajcik et al. 1998a,1998b). Furthermore, PBL students often have
trouble asking for help or admitting being stuck, which makes providing appropriate and timely
social support even more dicult for PBL instructors (Rees Lewis et al. 2017). The lack of social
support and failure to seek help can inuence progress, persistence, and ultimately the self-ecacy
of PBL students.
It may be possible to extend existing instructional resources for providing social support by
leveraging online communities of external supporters. Online communities may provide social
support to motivate students to persist and ultimately make progress to achieve higher learning
outcomes (Bruckman 2006), thus improving self-ecacy.
2.1 Opportunities and Challenges of PBL
Instructors use PBL environments to provide developmentally appropriate experiences that mirror
professional practice (Zitter and Hoeve 2012), teaching future innovators how to navigate critical
and non-trivial problems (Polman 2000). PBL instructors organize students into small project teams
to engage students in the process of “asking and rening questions, debating ideas, making pre-
dictions, designing plans and/or experiments, collecting and analyzing data, drawing conclusions,
communicating their ideas and ndings to others, asking new questions, and creating artifacts”
(Blumenfeld et al. 1991, p. 371).
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CheerOn: Facilitating Online Social Support for Novice Project-Based Learning Teams 32:5
In a traditional learning environment, instructors hand students carefully scoped, toy problems
that don’t require real-world solutions (McParland et al. 2004; Gerber et al. 2012). As such, PBL
provides an approach to train students in authentic real-world innovation work (McParland et al.
2004; Krajcik and Czerniak 2013).
When PBL presents students with authentic problems, students face greater learning challenges
than in traditional learning environments (Lande and Leifer 2010). PBL students must bridge disci-
plines and solve challenging questions that don’t have single correct answers, increasing learners’
need for social support (Blumenfeld et al. 1991). Furthermore, students engaged in PBL may re-
spond to challenging problems in non-productive ways. For example, PBL students who avoided
challenges tended to have lower self-ecacy, which inuenced their persistence and tolerance for
error (Davis et al. 2003). Students engaged in PBL solving “non-trivial problems” (Blumenfeld et al.
1991, p. 371) may struggle with managing ambiguous project work, which can lead to failure to
persist or make sucient progress (Krajck et al. 1998, p. 380). Given these demands, there is a need
to provide students with various kinds of social support to help them learn and engage in PBL
work (Krajck et al. 1998)
2.2 Importance of Social Support in PBL
HCI, psychology, and learning sciences researchers have long studied social support and have
provided many denitions of the construct (Heaney and Israel 2008). HCI researchers have studied
social support as online behaviors that express empathy, understanding, provide assistance, show
compassion (Barak et al. 2008; McKenna and Bargh 1998; Tanis 2007; Van Hooft et al. 2013), or
lightweight armations shown in social media such as “likes,” rearming tweets, or network
connections (Burke et al. 2009; Scissors et al. 2016). Psychologists have studied social support as
helpful actions that signal respect, encouragement, emotional support, or armation that conrms
one’s competence (Deelstra et al. 2003; Bandura 1997; Amabile et al. 1986). In this article, we dene
social support according to the House 1981 denition as actions that express care for another in
the categories of:
emotional support that provides empathy, trust, and care;
instrumental support that provides tangible aid and services to assist;
informational support that provides advice, suggestions, and problem solving;
appraisal support that provides armation that the acts or statements made by another are
appropriate and normal and resembles positive reinforcement.
Social support can strengthen self-ecacy, or one’s perceived ability to achieve a task (Staples
and Higgins 1998). Through enhancing self-ecacy, social support can “engender positive emo-
tional experiences, thereby reducing the negative eects of stress” (Pearlin et al. 1981). This is
particularly valuable for PBL students who may experience high levels of stress while engaging in
project work (Krajck et al. 1998). In PBL, social support from instructors or community members
addressing students’ competencies and contributions to the community may inuence their will-
ingness to persist (Reeve et al. 1999; Ryan and Deci 2000). In addition, social support can inuence
students’ willingness to seek help (Bandura 1997; Borgatti and Cross 2003).
Social support may aect persistence and progress in dierent ways. Non-specic appraisal or
emotional support that does not highlight specic behaviors has been shown to be less helpful for
learning (Bangert-Drowns et al. 1991; Hattie and Timerley 2007). However, instrumental, informa-
tional, or appraisal support that tells the learner how to change to more eectively reach their goal
can increase the learner’s self-ecacy. In cases where there is a signicant danger that students
will not persist, as in PBL, social support may also improve learning indirectly by temporarily
increasing learners’ self-ecacy and thus the likelihood that they persist. In addition, emotional
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32:6 E. Harburg et al.
support about the self may provide an extrinsic reward for progress or indirectly signal which goals
are valued. Furthermore, emotional support can help to increase feelings of psychological safety,
or the perception that one is able to take risks on a team, which can impact help-seeking behavior,
self-ecacy, and worker persistence (Edmondson 1999; Cheryan et al. 2011). This is particularly
important and dicult within an online context where users can feel distant from others and afraid
to expose vulnerability and their need for help in a public forum. Thus, fostering supportive virtual
learning environments where students receive emotional support and feel that they have access
to help can boost feelings of psychological safety, impact self-ecacy, persistence, and ultimately
progress (Kizilcec et al. 2017; Cheryan et al. 2011). Changing the feeling of support within an on-
line environment was found to be particularly powerful for women and minority students who
typically feel excluded from technical class environments (Cheryan et al. 2011). We believe this
highlights the opportunity that online environments can have in supporting PBL students who
typically suer from lower self-ecacy. Therefore, social support may serve an important role in
contexts such as PBL where learners may struggle with persistence.
2.3 Challenges of providing social support in PBL
Instructors face a number of challenges in providing sucient social support for PBL learners.
PBL instructors need to create an environment that promotes persistence and encourages in-
quiry, risk-taking, and thoughtfulness (Krajcik and Czerniak 2013). This places heavy demands
on PBL teachers as they attempt to play multiple roles in the classroom, such as facilitator and
coach. PBL must also orchestrate multiple groups of students (Mergendoller and Thomas 2005;
Blumenfeld et al. 1991). PBL environments require students to take more active roles (Gallagher
1997), so instructors struggle to adapt to the role of social supporter as they try to “shepherd”
multiple project teams (Laety et al. 1998). As a result, consistently tracking teams to provide
social support only adds to their existing workload. In addition, projects can create anxieties in
students that are dicult for instructors to dispel and support, which can negatively impact learn-
ers’ persistence and resilience (Lande and Leifer 2010; Goodyear et al. 2001). Given that PBL work
is complex, stressful, and uncertain (Lande and Leifer 2010;Doyle1983), participants need su-
cient motivation to persist in the face of these challenges (Lande and Leifer 2010; Blumenfeld et al.
1991). However, instructors managing PBL environments may wrestle with balancing the specic
needs of various students (Marx et al. 1997). As a result of these demands, PBL may not provide
learners with sucient social support. Finally, social support from a single instructor might be less
eective in increasing persistence (i.e., expectancy and value of work) than social support coming
from multiple peers (Ritchie and Newby 1989; Wegerif 1998) or a wider community (Blumenfeld
et al. 1996).
2.4 Social Support in Online Communities
Given PBL students’ need for social support and the diculty for instructors to provide sucient
social support, we might look to online communities to oer new ways to provide emotional,
instrumental, informational, and appraisal support. Researchers have begun to explore the ways
in which online community members provide social support to increase self-ecacy, impacting
persistence and progress. For example, signals of appraisal support via personal tokens of appre-
ciation on Wikipedia increased participation on the site by 60% (Restivo and Rjit 2012). Editors
who displayed their tokens of appreciation publicly edited signicantly more than those who did
not (Benkler and Shaw 2015). In addition, recognition from peers was found to be the most im-
portant motivator for contributors in a Chinese Wikipedia study (Liang and Hsu 2008). Research
suggests that informal rewards from peers on Wikipedia had a substantially positive eect on user
participation (Restivo and Rjit 2012). These peer interactions can also help to build social capital
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CheerOn: Facilitating Online Social Support for Novice Project-Based Learning Teams 32:7
(ex: trust, shared identity) between members, inuencing their eectiveness and performance
within the community (Resnick 2006; Benkler et al. 2015). Participating in such platforms has been
shown to help conrm one’s self-image of being an ecacious person (Rafaeli and Ariel 2008). As
such, participating in an online community can improve users’ sense of self-ecacy of their ability
to perform and contribute (Kollock 1999).
Research has shown that online social support can help users’ social presence, or “the degree
of salience of the other person in the (mediated) interaction and the consequent salience of the
interpersonal relationships” (Short et al. 1976). Social presence can impact one’s perception that
others are present and observing their behavior (Tu and Mcisaac 2002;Richardsonetal.2003;
Zajonc 1965). Social presence can increase feelings of connectedness and performance in learners
(Tu and Mcisaac 2002;Richardsonetal.2003). A study of online games showed that the presence
of an online audience positively improved performance in players (Bowman et al. 2013). Another
study showed that when newcomers on Wikipedia received follow-up comments to their posts,
they were 12% more likely to post to the community again (Joyce and Kraut 2006). This is con-
sistent with early psychological research suggesting that the presence of others can increase an
individual’s persistence (Zajonc 1965).
Researchers have identied many of the factors that inuence whether online community pro-
vides social support across a variety of contexts (e.g., online encyclopedia, movie rating system,
business online community, education etc.). People help strangers online to preserve their repu-
tation (Donath 1999; Wasko and Faraj 2005), for future reciprocation (Ackerman 1998), or to build
their own self-esteem (Bock et al. 2005; Wasko and Faraj 2005; Hertel et al. 2003; Kollock 1999).
Members of communities have been shown to oer social support to those with a shared identity
or aliation (Allen and Meyer 1996; Resnik 2001; Zimmerman et al. 2011), as well as when they
feel condent and comfortable in the online community (Rafaeli et al. 2009). In addition, users
tend to participate more frequently when they feel that they add value to the community or when
they believe that they have a unique opinion to contribute (Rashid et al. 2006; Ling et al. 2005;
Zimmerman et al. 2011). As such, we would expect that they would give more aid to others when
these factors are present for online community members.
2.5 Online Social Support for PBL Work
In order to facilitate increased social support, online communities may be used as part of a face-
to-face PBL environment in which students work and connect to a broader community of social
support (Blumenfeld et al. 1991; Subrahmanyam et al. 2008). For example, online platforms can
allow students to engage with expert mentors via online chat rooms or listservs as they solve di-
cult problems (Farquhar et al. 1997) or with online mentors (Sanchez and Harris 1996), facilitating
a process of drawing on the experiences of others online (Miller et al. 2005). In addition, peers
in massive online open courses (MOOCs) can provide social support to one another and encour-
age each other to make progress (Kizilcec and Schneider 2015). Students in the online MOOSE
community have been shown to learn from and support each other (Bruckman 2006). Online en-
vironments, like Blackboard, have also been used to help small groups of students collaborate on
project work online (Lou and MacGregor 2004; Pallo and Pratt 1999). In addition, remote col-
laboration systems, such as The Designers’ Outpost, allow for distributed design collaboration
for people as they work on design problems (Everitt et al. 2003). In addition, online communities
can oer an extension of classroom time in a way that can bridge barriers and power structures
that often exist in the classroom through increasing communication channels between instructors
and students (Klemmer et al. 2001; McComb 1994). Online communities like Scratch can facilitate
communities that collaborate and work on solving coding problems in a context outside of the
classroom (Resnik et al. 2009).
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32:8 E. Harburg et al.
However, online communities are not always eective at increasing student achievement. One
study showed that PBL groups were not equally successful in their ability to collaborate online
due to personality and motivational dierences (Thomas and MacGregor 2005). In addition, online
instructor facilitation and monitoring of team processes may not be as helpful for lower achiev-
ing students (Wang and Holcombe 2010). Furthermore, it can be dicult for instructors to even
recognize student anxieties.
While online communities still face similar challenges that oine environments produce, re-
search suggests that there are ways online systems can prompt behavior that is dicult to do
oine. For example, research suggests that students working with Intelligent Tutoring Systems
(ITSs) tended to not to seek help at the right time; however, this problem was aided by providing
prompting systems through online tutoring (Roll et al. 2011). Furthermore, the research found that
training students on how to seek help via the tool increased help-seeking behavior generally. They
found that the improved help-seeking led to increased learning progress. This provides insight into
the importance of prompting and incorporating training on help-seeking and help-giving within
online communities for PBL students. Thus, we nd that PBL can draw on the learnings of ITS
related to prompting and training PBL students around help-seeking. However, we can also build
to this research as the PBL students in our context have the ability to draw on a larger group of
people for help and social support. Thus, we have the chance to explore whether prompting and
training help in a community of support can help PBL students get the support they need to boost
their self-ecacy, impacting their persistence and ultimately progress. Finally, beyond technical
features in the system to prompt help-seeking and giving, there is also a need for PBL students to
feel safe online and thus this article explores how to foster an environment of psychological safety
for users to be willing to ask for help (Edmondson 1999).
2.6 External Online Communities for Social Support in Blended PBL
Online communities of external supporters provide a possible option for providing social sup-
port to students in PBL environments when teachers cannot provide sucient support. However,
such an approach faces many hurdles. First, in PBL environments for learning innovation, stu-
dents’ work involves large, complex, face-to-face, projects as opposed to small, discrete contribu-
tions to an online product typically studied in research on online communities (like Wikipedia).
Second, most PBL environments, such as 10-week university courses, are short lived, providing
insucient time and resources to establish a new online community or for learners to become
established members of an existing online community. Third, even if the rst two challenges can
be overcome, external online community members may lack the interest or ability to understand
students’ projects well enough to provide substantial social support. Fourth, even if external com-
munity members do provide social support in either in-person or blended PBL environments, it is
not clear whether it will signicantly impact students’ self-ecacy or persistence. The research
around online communities provides little guidance in how we might use external online commu-
nities to provide social support in PBL environments.
3 STUDY 1: SOCIAL SUPPORT NEEDS IN REAL-WORLD PBL
3.1 Purpose (Study 1)
The purpose of this study was to test whether the theoretical predictions about self-ecacy and
social support – suggesting that novices have low self-ecacy and don’t receive adequate social
support – are applicable in peer-led, PBL environments for teaching innovation. On the one hand
these theoretical applications could be entirely consistent in peer-led, PBL settings where novice
students feel that they lack sucient social support and self-ecacy. On the other hand, we could
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CheerOn: Facilitating Online Social Support for Novice Project-Based Learning Teams 32:9
nd that novice students in this context feel that they have sucient social support and don’t
wrestle with self-ecacy. To understand whether these theories apply in this context, this need-
nding study asked: Do students in PBL environments receive sucient social support to feel self-
ecacy in their work, which suciently motivates them to persist and make progress?
3.2 Methods (Study 1)
3.2.1 Study Design. We conducted an observational case study (Stake 1995) in a eld setting
and semi-structured interviews (Drever 1995) to understand social support in PBL environments
and provide a baseline for future interventions.
3.2.2 Research Site. We observed a 10-week, extra-curricular PBL innovation program at a
medium sized private Midwestern university. We investigated a peer-led PBL environment because
it has all the challenges of an instructor-led PBL learning environment but is even more likely to
expose the challenges of providing proper social support.
The program was created by innovation professionals and professors to prepare novice inno-
vators for solving real-world social problems. The program has chapters at 38 universities, one of
which was studied here. University professors, alumnae, and local professionals advised students
on their project during their innovation process. In total, there were approximately 127 profession-
als across the network that volunteered as coaches for teams. Peer instructors, students, mentors,
and coaches received no course credit and no pay. Participants designed solutions to real-world
social challenges selected by program developers. The four-person student teams were not re-
stricted to a particular solution, designing both services and products. Student teams presented
their process and solution at the conclusion of the term at a “nal expo” to other members of their
university design studio.
This design program provided an ideal context for studying PBL. On one hand, it provided an
example at the upper end on the challenge spectrum of PBL in universities, given that students
worked full time for 10 weeks, worked with clients from real community organizations, and were
led by experienced peers rather than professional instructors. It is also an ideal context because the
challenge level of the problem the students are working on is higher than what students are capable
of doing. This is interesting whether we’re working with pre-professionals, little kids working on
projects, or professionals working on complex innovation challenges.
3.2.3 Participants. We observed 15 students, ages 17–25, from diverse disciplines who had be-
tween 0 and 4 years of studying design at the undergrad level. Participation was optional. Par-
ticipants were not compensated for participation in the study. All teams were assigned with an
external mentor whom they would meet with in person occasionally or connect with over e-mail.
3.2.4 Data Collection. We conducted individual semi-structured interviews with 15 PBL stu-
dents to understand if they received sucient social support to make progress. Each interview
began with an explanation of the method and a description of our research interest. We explained
that we would record and transcribe the interview and were not evaluating the class and guar-
anteed anonymity. Interviews lasted between 20 and 30 minutes and averaged 25 minutes. The
total time of need-nding interviews was 450 minutes. Interviews were recorded and transcribed
resulting in 44 pages of transcripts. Interviews were conducted at dierent stages of the course to
understand if persistence and need for greater support changed over time. This research approach
allowed us to collect in situ data, but is susceptible to self-report bias (Spradley 2016). We also
recorded time-stamped elds notes about each of the witnessed experiences.
3.2.5 Data Analysis. We used structured-case analysis, which involved taking a constructed
theoretical framework of social support and comparing whether this theory aligned with our case
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32:10 E. Harburg et al.
Fig. 2. When students don’t externalize progress or prompt help-seeking, supporters are less able to oer
social support, which hurts self-eicacy, impacting persistence and ultimately progress.
(Carroll and Swatman 2000). This method allowed us to evaluate whether students in PBL com-
munities receive sucient social support to make progress and stay motivated (see Figure 2for
reference). Upon examination of the data we found that students received dierent kinds of so-
cial support. We reviewed varying denitions of social support to understand which denition
aligned most appropriately with the types of social support students reported receiving in the
data. From this we choose to follow House’s (1981) denition of social support, as it most closely
resembles the nature of the social support we observed in our context. Specically, House’s def-
inition allowed us to dierentiate appraisal support praising certain actions or statements made,
from emotional support, as well as instrumental support that provides tangible assistance from
informational support that oers verbal support. These distinctions allowed us to more closely
examine the dierent mechanisms for providing social support online. From this denition, we
developed a coding manual (see Appendix) that detailed the four types of social support according
the House (1981) denition, providing agreed upon examples from our social support data of each
social support type reported.
We used this literature to construct questions to understand social support phenomenon within
the context of PBL teams. After conducting preliminary interviews with 15 students, we coded for
instances of social support, specically, where students expressed feeling: emotional support, in-
strumental support, informational support, or appraisal support from members of the community
including peers, faculty, student leaders, mentors, and coaches. Moving between inductive and
deductive reasoning, we identied social support needs. We developed initial inferences through
this iterative process. After the rst round of interviews, we asked more targeted questions to in-
dividuals to test these hypotheses. We reviewed all relevant data and evaluated the strength of our
evidence to inform whether initial inferences should be modied or abandoned based on insub-
stantial evidence. All quotations were directly transcribed from interviews without grammatical
corrections.
3.3 Results (Study 1)
Study 1 asked: (RQ1) Do students in PBL communities receive sucient social support to make
progress? Study 1 found that social support for PBL students in the form of appraisal, informa-
tional, emotional, and instrumental support (House 1981), occurred infrequently and often came
too late to support students’ progress. This occurred in part because the student’s progress was
not visible to instructors.
Specically, study 1 found that students: (a) felt motivated by social support in the forms of
appraisal, informational, emotional, and instrumental support as shown in Table 1, yet rarely re-
ceived any of these social support types until the very end of the project when they externalized
progress; (b) often felt stuck, but rarely externalized their progress and need for help; and (c) often
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CheerOn: Facilitating Online Social Support for Novice Project-Based Learning Teams 32:11
Table 1. Students Receive Emotional, Instrumental, Informational, and Appraisal Social Support,
but Too Lile and Too Late
Social Support Type Description Example
Emotional support Provides empathy, trust, and care. “They said, ‘Don’t freak out, it’s ok’.”
Instrumental support Provides tangible aid and services
to assist.
“She [coach] did some stu for us for
interior design.”
Informational support Provides advice, suggestions, and
problem solving.
Someonesaid‘...go forwardwith
that. Do more of this.’”
Appraisal support of. . .
Provides armation on the
appropriateness of acts or
statements.
...value ofproject States qualities about the project.
“[A lead sta member] came by and
said ‘This [project solution] is really
smart!’”
...work
Says something about the correct
(right/wrong) or information about
the quality of work.
“Having faculty say, ‘Wow, you’re on
the right path.’ That helped us a lot!”
...person Makes statements about qualities
of team.
“When we gave our pitch they said,
‘Wow, you have a lot of passion!’”
lacked a clear sense of progress while working on their project, inuencing their persistence and
ultimately progress.
3.3.1 Motivations of PBL Students. PBL students felt motivated by receiving appraisal, informa-
tional, emotional, and instrumental support, but rarely received these forms of social support until
the end of their project when their progress was externalized.
PBL students reported feeling motivated when they received appraisal support that armed
their project work and instrumental support that oered help, especially when coming from high-
status individuals. As one student explained: “[We were motivated] when people are really excited
about what [we’re] doing and want to help and share their expertise.” This demonstrates how PBL
students found it motivating when supporters oered appraisal support that armed their work
and instrumental support that showed a willingness to help. Another student explained feeling
motivated by people arming their work at the nal presentation: “People in the [nal] presen-
tation were very impressed. [The founder of the program] actually came by and said, ‘This is really
smart’ and I felt really good about that. . . During the presentation, several other professors came by. . .
and said, ‘This is awesome. You guys did a great job.’ – and it felt great.” Students expressed feeling
particularly motivated when they were given appraisal support from high-status individuals such
as instructors, mentors, and domain experts. As one student working on food waste in cafeterias
said: “The armation is bigger when it comes from more experienced members.” These students high-
lighted that the impact of social support was stronger when it came from high-status individuals.
Informational support providing advice and emotional support expressing care helped moti-
vate students to persist and make progress. Students expressed how helpful it was when external
supporters shared advice and perspectives on student projects. One student noted the benets of
feedback from expert external supporters: “I always appreciate having a third party who knows the
process extremely well to come in to speak to my team. I just remember.. . we had outside feedback
come in [to their classroom for a critique session], it was so helpful.” This student explained that
having external helpers provide informational feedback on what to do next helped them to make
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32:12 E. Harburg et al.
progress. Students also noted that emotional support from external supporters reassured them
that they were on track. As the student explained, “There was a time when my team felt particu-
larly stuck, and the professionals came in and gave us some amazing advice and said ‘Don’t freak
out, it’s ok. You don’t need to make this amazing solution that will change the world, just solve the
problem’.. . It was one of those moments where it was not good.. . but then they said, ‘Back it up and
it is all good. . . Then you get reassured and take a break for a hot sec and come back and it works.” In
this case, appraisal and emotional support reassured and motivated the team to persist.
Despite these instances of social support from external helpers, most social support (of all forms)
rarely came until the end of the project when students were nished. PBL students reported that
they did not often receive social support from instructors and mentors during the project. As one
student said, “We weren’t getting feedback reinforcing that this was exciting.. . the armation only
came at the end from some of the sta and faculty when we were presenting our nal projects.” Given
instructors’ and mentors’ limited time, students infrequently received social support on their work
during the program. As another student said, “It [our project] wasn’t really recognized until our nal
expo [presentation]. When we gave our pitch they said, ‘Wow, you have a lot of passion.’ When we
were recognized then, people on our team said ‘Wow, hearing that feedback was helpful.’”Herethe
students point to fact that they hadn’t received social support until the after their project was
complete. Many other students we interviewed expressed receiving little social support before the
end of their project, and some did not feel that they received social support even then.
The lack of social support, while unfortunate, is understandable. While PBL students had ac-
cess to 127 mentors across the network, only 9 local mentors were actively engaged in support-
ing project teams. Given the many demands of orchestrating PBL environments, instructors and
mentors have limited time to provide social support, which is not unique to this specic PBL en-
vironment (Lande and Leifer 2010).
3.3.2 Students Felt Decision Uncertainty but Rarely Sought Help. PBL students were often un-
sure how to move forward. During these times, PBL students reported having trouble asking for
help and discussing problems only internally with their team, despite the fact that in cases where
students did receive external support, they felt more motivated to persist.
Students reported often experiencing decision uncertainty during the PBL project process. One
student working on an urban planning project said: “If you don’t know where to go, if you don’t
know your next step, you’re completely stuck.” Students reported feeling uncomfortable moving
forward when they didn’t hear from their partner organizations. As one student said: “We didn’t
feel comfortable moving to ideate stage because it’s for our user and we’re not getting [user] input. How
do we jump to a solution? We got stuck.” Students reported also feeling conicted by the multiple
options they could take. One member working on building comforting rooms for newly adopted
kids said: “Right now we all feel a little stuck because we’re discussing what we want to do with
the room and there are so many ideas and possibilities about what the style of the room is.” Stu-
dents also reported struggling with dening the problem they were trying to solve. As one stu-
dent said: “A big problem with this project was actually trying to gure out what the real problems
were.” Students often went back and forth between multiple problems and solutions, experiencing
uncertainty.
When students faced decision uncertainty, they did not seek help. As one student working on a
project for cancer patients described, “When we got stuck it was more of a ‘Let’s see what we can do
this week and come back the week after.’ I usually didn’t reach out to people when we were stuck. .. We
didn’t really let other people know that’s where we were at.” Most students said that project status
was only shared privately via Google docs, if at all. One student said: “We’re not really checking in
with anyone about our progress. . . we kind of forgot to keep them [mentors] in the loop .. . we didn’t
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CheerOn: Facilitating Online Social Support for Novice Project-Based Learning Teams 32:13
really tell them [mentors] about anything until working up till the nal product. It would have been
nice [to share our progress with them].
Students gave several reasons for not seeking help, including evaluation apprehension, time
constraints, and the infrequency of meetings. Teams noted how part of not reaching out to mentors
stemmed from them not being sure if they were on track, and thus not wanting to admit that they
were behind. As one member said, “You get wrapped up in your projects. You get nervous of where
you are or where you should be.” One project team described how the mentors for her PBL team
rarely were in the loop with her group given that they met infrequently due to the business of their
mentor’s schedules. She said: “Our mentor didn’t really know what was going on because meetings
were irregular. We met only two times.” Given the infrequency of check-ins, students expressed
feeling separated from their mentors and reported being less willing to ask others for help.
3.3.3 Students Reported Feeling a Low Sense of Progress While Conducting Project Work. PBL
students often felt they were making little progress and were unaware of how their progress com-
pared to others, demonstrating the lack of appraisal support, which inuenced persistence.
Students often felt they were making little progress in their project work. Given the time-
intensive nature of PBL work and multi-step design process, students reported feeling a low sense
of progress throughout the project. Students discussed how they would get “deep in the weeds
and a low sense for all that they had accomplished. As one team working on designing a room
described: “The discussions we’re having are all really good and valid but we’re not making too much
concrete progress. Because we have a lot of ideas to discuss but designing within a whole room is kind
of hard because we don’t know all of the themes, because guring this kind of stu [design decisions]
out is hard.” This illustrates one of the challenges of PBL work that comes as a result of dicult
decisions with no single answer and a lack of clear progress as a consequence.
Teams reported being unaware of their progress relative to other teams. One student described
how he rarely knew how other teams were progressing. As he stated: “Ihavenoideawhereother
students are.” One expressed reason for being unaware was due to the time burden on students as
a result of project time constraints as well their other homework assignments and extracurricu-
lar activities. In addition, students also expressed uncertainty around whether they were on track
compared to others given that students are working on dierent projects and struggle to collabo-
rate. As one student described: “It takes too much time to look at other student’s project updates–I like
seeing what they are doing at the end, not a thing that students collaborate that much.” Given that
it takes time to check in with other teams, students reported being unsure of how their progress
compared with that of other students. Teams also noted that not many members of the community
were aware of their work accomplishments. One member working on building sustainable coee
shops talked about how none of the other students knew about his team’s progress during the
term. As he said, “Other studio members don’t know about the success [of our team],” suggesting
students often operate internally and are not making use of their support resources around them,
which can inuence persistence. The focal time that students seemed to be aware of their relative
progress was at the end of the program. As one member stated, “Not until the end of the [10 weeks]
did we have a sense for where you are compared to other students.” The lack of appraisal support
validating the appropriateness of their acts along the way inuenced student persistence. That
being said, the students still did make some progress, which boosted persistence.
Perceived progress inuenced persistence on project work. Students felt that making progress
increased their persistence. As one student described, “Having faculty come in [during nal pre-
sentations] and say: ‘Wow, you’re on the right path.’ That helped us a lot.” Teams were encour-
aged when people oered appraisal support through recognizing the progress they were making
and conrming that they were working in the right direction. Yet this happened infrequently and
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32:14 E. Harburg et al.
often came too late in the process, inuencing retention. As one student working on a dementia
project noted: “We wanted to nd progress, but we were struggling.. . it’s hard to have motivation .. .
our team kind of died out at that point.” These students lost motivation when they were having
trouble making progress. The lack of being able to feel a sense of clear progress inuenced mo-
tivation and inuenced some members desire to persist in project work. Other mediating factors
that inuenced this decision to persist or terminate projects included: project timing and busyness
of student schedules amidst other responsibilities, personality of students who felt more or less
interest in the topic or desire to conduct this type of work, as well as poor team dynamics that left
teams not wanting to work together in the future.
3.4 Discussion (Study 1)
We found that students often faced decision uncertainty during project work, but social support
came infrequently and often too late, in part because students did not externalize progress nor
seek help, leading to decreased persistence and progress. While students did produce some tangible
outputs, which has been shown to help promote a sense of forward progress and strengthen beliefs
of creative ability (Gerber et al. 2012), students still often felt unsure as to if they were on track
and unclear of what steps to take next. While some students continued to persist on their projects
amidst this uncertainty and lack of social support, others decided to terminate their projects at the
end of the quarter. Other mediating factors could have inuenced this decision including timing,
interest, personalities, and team dynamics. While some of these factors cannot be controlled, social
support is a factor that has the ability to be better monitored to help boost increase self-ecacy of
students, inuencing persistence and performance.
The ndings from Study 1 were consistent with the expected theoretical challenges and relation-
ships between social support and persistence in blended environments for novice PBL students.
However, we found that when students did receive appraisal support conrming the importance of
their work, even at the end of their project, they reported feeling more motivated on their projects.
This is contrary to empirical research suggesting that positive feedback is unhelpful in the class-
room because it does not provide feedback that helps the learner judge their knowledge and skill
(Hattie and Timerley 2007). In a PBL environment where persistence cannot be taken for granted,
appraisal support may provide needed motivation. In addition, the lack of instrumental and infor-
mational support led to students feeling unable to ask for help given that they were unsure how
others could help them.
The study identies a number of opportunities. Although it is unlikely that the peer instructor
could provide as much social support as a team desired, there was in fact a larger community
of potential supporters that did interact with student teams. Accessing this community to provide
social support in the forms of informational, instrumental, emotional, or appraisal support depends
at least in part on overcoming student teams’ reluctance to externalize progress. Students may, in
fact, be willing to externalize progress and monitor other teams for reasons such as comparing
progress with others. Study 1 both corroborates the usefulness of providing social support in the
forms of appraisal, emotional, informational, and instrumental support. It also suggests a potential
role for online communities to provide social support based on externalizations of student progress
so as to help students receive more social support throughout the learning process.
4STUDY2:CHEERON: AN ONLINE SOCIAL SUPPORT SYSTEM FOR PBL
4.1 Purpose
The need-nding study indicated that although a peer instructor may not be able to provide fre-
quent social support to students throughout the PBL process, we might be able to enlist a pool
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CheerOn: Facilitating Online Social Support for Novice Project-Based Learning Teams 32:15
Fig. 3. External supporters in the online community receive prompts and progress reports from teams’
project management activities to enlist them to provide social support.
of external supporters in online communities to provide social support through online tools that
prompt teams to externalize progress and prompt supporters to provide social support. Study 2
asked: (RQ2) How might we design a socio-technical system that incorporates external supporters to
provide social support to increase student persistence in PBL environment?
We propose that such a system can be designed to provide social support by engaging students
in intrinsically motivating practices whose side eect is to externalize progress to an online com-
munity of supporters who are then likely to provide social support, circumventing students’ dis-
position to not explicitly seek help. Specically, online communities for providing social support
to students in blended PBL environments for innovation should:
engage learners to externalize progress through collaborative to-do lists and stand-up meet-
ing templates that help teams track and review progress and that post progress to an exter-
nal, online community;
recruit external supporters from the local design community to provide social support to
specic teams;
facilitate external social support by periodically prompting supporters and providing fea-
tures that allow supporters to respond to teams’ externalized progress.
We expect the intervention described by the design argument in Figure 3and Table 1to work
as follows:
1. Recruit: The community manager, such as an instructor or teaching assistants (TA), recruits
members from the local design community, such as senior students and alumnae to become
external supporters. The community manager relies on the eectiveness of word-of-mouth
recruiting from social networks (Kraut et al. 2012) to bootstrap a group of external support-
ers with strong identity-based commitment to design teams and bonds-based commitment
to the manager, when members feel socially or emotionally attached to particular members
of the community, which is further supported by online photos and prole pages (Festinger
et at. 1950; Kraut and Resnik 2010; Ren et al. 2012).
2. Train: The community manager trains design teams in two project management tech-
niques: collaboratively tracking tasks and daily stand-up meetings, daily updates in which
teams quickly identify whether they are on track and what obstacles are in their way
(Rasmussen and Ludvigsen 2010). Crucially, these practices are seen by teams as having
instrumental value to the team’s success so teams will engage in these activities sponta-
neously after a relatively small amount of formal training (Kraut et al. 2012).
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32:16 E. Harburg et al.
3. Externalize work: The online platform provides tools for tracking to-dos and communicat-
ing stands that scaold their work (Reiser 2004) and make their thinking visible (Bransford
et al. 2000). The purpose of the externalization of progress is to make supporters more
aware of the state of the students to increase the oering of social support.
4. Highlight progress: The system uses the to-dos and stands to track progress and obstacles
and post this on the activity stream.
5. Broadcast progress: The system routes information about progress and obstacles to support-
ers of a specic team, eectively selecting and externalizing communicating (Kraut et al.
2012) of progress.
6. Prompt support: The community manager periodically reminds supporters (if necessary) to
provide social support – these requests are likely to be fullled because they are simple
and made to specic supporters from a liked requester (Kraut et al. 2012).
7. Provide social support: Supporters oer social support regarding the team’s progress dis-
played on the team’s activity stream.
8. Broadcast support: The activity stream is communicated to the team, again eectively ex-
ternalizing communication (Kraut et al. 2012) of social support.
4.2 CheerOn System Description
We implemented this design argument in the CheerOn system with the following features in
Table 2:
4.3 Methods (Study 2)
4.3.1 Study Design. Study 2 consisted of an observational case study in a eld setting to test
the eectiveness of the design argument at providing online social support in a PBL environment.
4.3.2 Research Site. We conducted this research with the same extracurricular design organi-
zation used in the need-nding study, this time focusing on a group of PBL students who worked
on projects during the summer. PBL teams worked on pro-social design projects on: diabetes, food
programs for the homeless, and refugee assistance. The students presented their projects at the
conclusion of the 6-week-long project at a “nal expo” to other members of their design commu-
nity.
4.3.3 Participants. The program included 12 design students (7 females, 5 males) and 15 des-
ignated online supporters. Students were placed in 3 interdisciplinary teams of 4 students each.
Student’s majors included: Chemical Engineering (1), Art, Theory and Practice (1), Manufacturing
and Design Engineering (1), Mechanical Engineering (4), Comparative Literature (1), Engineering
Sciences and Applied Mathematics (1), Computer Science (2), and Computer Engineering (1).
The summer program was led by an experienced undergraduate “lead” who served as an in-
structor and coordinator. Each team had 1–2 experienced design professionals who served as
design coaches, although 2 of these coaches dropped out of the program midway due to travel
obligations.
We recruited 15 professional designers, graduate, and undergraduate students studying systems
design, experienced members and alumnae of the local design community network to give weekly
social support using CheerOn to the 3 student teams. There were 15 supporters (9 females, 6 males).
Five were undergraduate peers engaged in design work, 5 were PhD design students, 2 were design
professional trainers, 2 were startup founders, and 2 were recent graduates with design research
experience. All had some understanding of the projects and had some level of previous design
experience. Recruited supporters did not receive credit or pay.
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CheerOn: Facilitating Online Social Support for Novice Project-Based Learning Teams 32:17
Table 2. We Blend Theoretical and Empirical Research in HCI, Learning Sciences, Psychology
to Inform the Design of Socio-Technical System for PBL
Feature Description Design Principles
1Community
manager
Community manager (an instructor or
teaching assistant):
—Recruits online supporters from local
community;
—Trains student teams in project
management practices and tools;
—Prompts supporters to provide social
support.
Recruiting from manager’s bond-based,
social network through word of mouth
allows rapid enlistment of supporters
(Kraut et al. 2012). Explicit training helps
novice teams successfully use platform
(Kraut et al. 2012). Prompts involving
simple requests to specic supporters
who like the manager are likely to be
fullled (Kraut et al. 2012).
2User prole and
team pages
Online community features allow
students and supporters to create user
and team proles with real names, photos,
team and community purpose, and
conversation threads.
These online community features support
identity and bonds-based commitment
between supporters and students (Ren
et al. 2012).
3To-do list Collaborative task management tool helps
team track tasks, task owners, and task
status. Each student team had an online
collaborative to-do list which teams used
to track the tasks, task owners, and task
completion status.
Positive production externality. The
To-Do list and Stands help to scaold
(Reiser 2004) an intrinsically motivating
activity that students will spontaneously
engage in (Kraut et al. 2012). This process
also helps to make thinking and needs
more visible (Bransford et al. 2000)to
external supporters, an activity students
would ordinarily avoid (see Study 1).
4Stands Stands would include the following 5
prompts: (a) What’s your sprint goal for
this week? (b) Are you on track to
achieving your sprint goal? (c) What
specic progress have you made toward
the goal since last stand? (d) What will
you achieve between now and the next
stand? And (e) what obstacles are in the
way of achieving your sprint goal and
whom do you need to talk to or what will
you do to overcome these obstacles?
5Activity feed Activity feed records completed to-dos,
stands and cheers and broadcasts to
supporters and teams. Posts could also be
“liked.” Supporters following the feed
receive email notications when teams’
complete items on the to-do list or
complete a stand along with a link to the
feed.
Activity stream selects and highlights
progress and facilitates external
communication between teams and
supporters (Kraut et al. 2012). The
externalization of progress on the activity
feed is intended to make supporters more
aware of the state of the students to
increase the oering of social support.
6Social support Underneath completed to-do items and
stands posted on the feed is a cheering
icon, text eld and a prompt to “Give
them a cheer!” (Figure 4). Automatic email
notications to followers of completed
to-do items and stands also prompted
supporters to cheer for their teams. Social
support appears on the activity feed and
is broadcasted via email to the team
members and others following the feed.
This feature scaolds appraisal social
support (Reiser 2004) and makes social
support easy to provide increasing
likelihood of providing it (Kraut et al.
2012).
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32:18 E. Harburg et al.
Fig. 4. Through the CheerOn platform, project-based learning students can post progress on their projects to
a group of facilitated supporters. Online social support can then be posted to students aer accomplishing
their to-do’s and stands via CheerOn within the online community. On the le, we highlight the core features
of CheerOn. On the right, supporters give social support on a post reporting team completion of a to-do item.
4.3.4 Intervention. On the rst day of the program one member of the research team informed
each student team that community members (called supporters in this article) would comment on
the team’s CheerOn page (two to three minute conversation). Supporters were asked to participate
over a preliminary email and then were reminded to give social support to students in weeks 1, 3,
and 6 of the program as students progressed on their work. In addition to the recruited support-
ers, 2 of the graduate student researchers served as community managers (which in a traditional
classroom would be a responsibility held by a teaching assistant). The 2 researchers and 2 un-
dergraduate research assistants also played the role of supporter in addition to the 15 recruited
supporters. We explain the limitations and decision to take this approach in our Limitations sec-
tion. The CheerOn system was a closed system and only open to invited external members who
were asked to participate. In addition, there were other community members already in the sys-
tem (ex: coaches and sta) who participated in the CheerOn system and gave social support after
seeing the prompts without being asked to give social support. While we asked the 15 recruited
supporters to oer social support, some other online community members still participated in of-
fering social support without being asked (ex: coaches, sta, and team members who were already
invited into the system).
4.3.5 Data Collection. We conducted interviews with each of the 12 students at the beginning,
middle, and end of the program (weeks 1, 3, and 6) for a total of over 600 minutes of interviews. Our
interviews focused on understanding how using the CheerOn tool inuenced students perceived
community support, sense of progress, task direction, and self-ecacy (see full coding protocol
in Appendix A). We also interviewed the 15 supporters midway through the project and at the
conclusion of the project for a total of over 690 minutes of interviews. These interviews with sup-
porters focused on understanding what factors motivated the supporters to participate and oer
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CheerOn: Facilitating Online Social Support for Novice Project-Based Learning Teams 32:19
social support to students, as well as how supporters perceived using CheerOn (see full interview
protocol in Appendix B). Over 500 pages of interviews were transcribed for analysis. We collected
and analyzed 135 social support posts.
4.3.6 Data Analysis. We conducted four analyses to understand how CheerOn aects the provi-
sions of social support in a peer-led, blended PBL environment. Our analyses asked the following:
1. What kind of social support was provided (if any) and by whom?
2. What factors inuenced recruited supporters to provide social support?
3. (Post-hoc) What factors caused the lead to provide social support?
4. How did receiving online social support impact PBL students?
To assess our inter-rater reliability and Cohen’s Kappa scores we rst developed a codebook based
on House (1981) denition of social support (see Appendix C). Next we had two raters indepen-
dently code all of the data (295 social support comments) to assess the validity of the codebook.
Once we reached 100% agreement on the coding, we revised the codebook to ensure that these
specicities were revised. Next we found a separate, unbiased rater to code 60 randomly gener-
ated social support comments, or roughly 20% of the data, which is higher than the recommended
10% of data (Campbell et al. 2013, p. 300). We ensured that a variety of social support comments
were present in the 60 social support comments to ensure that all types of data was coded and
compared. We compared the 60 data points with the agreed upon codes that had been created,
and the measured inter-rater reliability and Cohen’s Kappa scores to assess reliability of the data.
Following Miles and Huberman’s (1984) inter-rater reliability formula, we reached an inter-rater
reliability score of 0.816 (81.6%). According to Miles and Huberman (1984, p. 63), a score between
80 and 90% is seen as reliable. Thus, we felt condent in our inter-rater reliability score. Our Co-
hen’s Kappa score was 0.76. According to Landis and Koch (1997, p. 165), a Cohen’s Kappa score
between 0.61 and 0.80 signies substantial strength of agreement. As such, we felt satised with
the reliability of our coding scheme.
For analyses 2–4, we used the interview data, we conducted structured qualitative analysis
where we organized the data and then worked to draw conclusions from the data (Miles and
Huberman 1994) to assess the eects of using CheerOn on the persistence of PBL students. We
grouped the comments of the student interviews into the emergent themes of: value of work,
identity, and help-seeking. These were compared to the key themes that emerged in Study 1 re-
lated to struggles of PBL students. To examine what motivated supporters to oer social support,
we examined the data from our interviews with supporters and developed a second coding pro-
tocol related to what motivated supporters to oer social support. Themes emerged related to
why supporters contributed, including the following: (1) commitment to project and community,
(2) perceived ability and understanding of how to help, and (3) sense of reciprocity.
4 RESULTS (STUDY 2)
Study 2 asked (RQ2): How might we design a socio-technical system that incorporates external
supporters to provide social support to increase student persistence in PBL environment?
4.4.1 Analysis 1: What Kind of Social Support was Provided (if any) and by Whom? While
CheerOn was designed for external supporters and community managers to provide support to
teams, which they did, almost half of the social support came from leads and coaches who were
not explicitly asked to provide social support. Recruited supporters, coaches, researchers, team
members, and the project lead gave social support to the project teams (see Figure 5and Table 3).
Table 4shows that the lead provided the most social support (29%), followed by managers (re-
searchers and RA’s 28%), followed by the 3 coaches (22%), and the 15 assigned supporters (21%).
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32:20 E. Harburg et al.
Fig. 5. Recruited supporters and researchers provided social support comments to Project Teams via
CheerOn, and unexpectedly, so did the undergraduate studio lead and professional coaches.
Table 3. Appraisal Support, in the form of Appraisal of Work, was the Most Common Social Support Given
Support Type Description CheerOn Example # comments
Emotional Provides empathy, trust, and
care.
Ihopetheteamisallhealthy
by Thursday!”
37
Instrumental Provides tangible aid and
services to assist.
“Hey Team - I emailed my
contact. I’ll loop you folks in
as soon as he agrees to help.”
37
Informational Provides advice, suggestions,
and problem solving.
“Today it might help to start
sketching out the dierent
ideas you have. This will help
esh out some of the details.”
81
Appraisal of. . . Provides armation on the
appropriateness of acts or
statements.
. . . project value States qualities about the
project.
“Super excited to see you guys
working on the important
problem.”
17
...work Sayssomething aboutthe
correct (right/wrong)
approach to work.
“Hey guys! Great job at crit
today. Love how in-depth you
are going with the research.”
137
. . . person Makes statements about
qualities of the team
members.
“You guys are great.” 8
Total 317
Comments that did not t into the coding scheme were removed.
Note that as the instructional responsibility of the role increased, the number of people in that
role decreased, for example, the single studio lead had the responsibility to oversee all teams, each
of the 5 coaches was responsible for mentoring 1 team (though not all did), and 15 assigned sup-
porters who only occasionally provided support to 1 team online. Those with greater instructional
responsibility provided more social support, so the cumulative amount of support from each group
was roughly equivalent.
This relation also aected the type of support given. The most common type of social support
given was appraisal support, which validated the progress students had made on their work and
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CheerOn: Facilitating Online Social Support for Novice Project-Based Learning Teams 32:21
Table 4. Informational Support came from those with Instructional Roles, While Appraisal
Support came from Leads and Managers
Tea m
Posts Comments Emotional
Support
Instrumental
Support
Informational
Support
Appraisal support of. . .
Tot al
# #/person # % value work person
Lead 1 38 38.0 92 29% 8 8 33 5 35 4 93
Managers 4 46 11.5 90 28% 13 8 24 5 39 0 89
Coaches 3 22 7.3 69 22% 7 5 13 0 35 3 63
Supporters 1 29 1.9 66 21% 7 15 13 7 27 0 63
5
Total 2 135 317 100% 35 36 83 17 136 7 314
3
reinforced the importance of their work, for example, comments such as “great job synthesizing
your research.” Recruited supporters mostly gave appraisal support or oered instrumental sup-
port (Table 4), given that they knew less about the state of the students and their work. The lead,
coaches, and managers gave more informational and emotional support. We believe that this was
in part because they saw the students more frequently and knew more about their progress and
emotional states.
The type of social support given changed throughout the project. At the beginning of the PBL
assignments, social support comments were mostly appraisal support validating the importance
of the project and instrumental support oering to help out in any way. The type of social support
then shifted to oer more informational support providing guidance and suggestions and appraisal
support validating progress. Towards the end of the program, we observed more emotional support
expressing care and empathy, as well as continued appraisal support validating work. Of course,
not all social support is of the same “value.” We describe how these dierences aected students
and the implications for designing social support systems later in Analysis 4.
4.4.2 Analysis 2: Factors Influencing Provision of Social Support by Recruited Supporters. Creat-
ing online social support communities for PBL students depends on the extent to which supporters
participate and oer social support to students, so: what inuenced recruited supporters to provide
social support?
Recruited supporters described three conditions that increased their provision of social support,
when: (a) they had a commitment to the community and felt peer pressure; (b) they understood a
team’s need for help and had the ability to help; and (c) they received gratitude from students who
heeded their assistance. Unfortunately, these conditions were not always present.
4.4.2.1 Condition 1: Community Commitment. Supporters provided more social support when
they had identity-based commitments to the design community and bonds-based commitments to
the project members.
Supporters provided social support, particularly appraisal and instrumental support, when they
identied with the design community. As one community member familiar with design network
said: “I know they are trying to do a quick development of a project that solves a problem. That, in
itself, is something I can relate to and appreciate. The problems [the design community network] stu-
dents are trying to solve–I support that larger mission, by relation I support the team.” Supporters
who identied with the design community felt empathy for students and provided instrumental
support by oering their services and appraisal support by encouraging the process. Another sup-
porter said, “I’m very familiar with [the design network community] and their process.” This led to
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32:22 E. Harburg et al.
oering appraisal support by giving teams advice. When supporters didn’t identify with teams,
they wondered what they shared in common with students and were less motivated to provide so-
cial support: “If I had seen what was in common that might have been a bit more motivating.” Feeling
a personal connection to the larger mission of the community or understanding and respecting the
students design process increased their willingness to participate.
Supporters provided social support, particularly appraisal and instrumental support, when they
felt bonds to the design community. As one member stated: “Ifeellikeanhonorarymember-Im
very familiar with the process and a lot of the students in there. It didn’t feel strange I felt like I was
familiar with most people...” Familiarity with the community increased supporters’ willingness
to contribute. Supporters outside the organization who didn’t have a personal bond to the stu-
dent teams often found it dicult to provide social support for people they did not know. As one
community member said: “It was hard to cheer for people I had never met before, I felt kind of awk-
ward doing that.” Supporters without a connection to the community, online or oine, seemed
less willing to give social support to students online. Some supporters noted how it felt “articial
to give social support to students they didn’t know. While CheerOn allowed users to see proles of
the students, supporters said that this was not enough for them to feel connected to them. As one
supporter said: “I would have liked to know a little more about them. . . I guess it doesn’t really build
a connection with the people that I was going to be cheering [giving online social support]. If I knew
more about them I might have commented more.” Supporters also desired to know more about the
students to whom they were giving social support.
4.4.2.2 Condition 2: Peer Pressure. Social facilitation (peer pressure) among supporters in-
creased social support. While many of the external supporters did not initially know their teams,
they sometimes knew other supporters. Supporters were moved to participate when they saw other
supporters giving online social support. As one supporter said on their purpose of commenting:
I think it might be partially because I knew those people who were cheering [giving social support].
I knew the [design network] community and it had the community aspect to it and they were partici-
pating in something I also wanted to participate.” Some supporters said that they felt that it was a
bit less odd to give social support to those they didn’t know when they saw other supporters also
commenting on the site. As one member stated: “When I rst got the email, I thought it was going
to be a little awkward because I don’t know these people. At the same time, I felt a little less awkward
when I saw others on there, so it’s totally cool.” Seeing other supporters posting helped them feel
more willing to participate, as they felt less alone. In addition, supporters tended to mirror the
social support type of those who had gone before them. For example, if someone gave appraisal
support, others would mirror similar appraisal support comments. One student noted how they
were more motivated when they noticed others comment: “It was cool to see the posts from other
people–I felt that it was good that I cheered and that I wasn’t the only one. When I didn’t see interac-
tions from other people, I felt like I didn’t have to do it as much.” Supporters were heavily inuenced,
both positively and negatively, by the others participation within the online community. By seeing
the other participants within the community actively giving online social support that they knew,
supporters wanted to in turn also participate.
4.4.2.3 Condition 3: Supporter Saw Clear Need for Help. When external supporters received spe-
cic help requests or saw a clear need for help they provided informational support by giving
concrete advice or provided instrumental support by oering their services.
Perceived ability to provide help increased giving of informational and instrumental support.
Supporters tended to oer social support only if they felt they could help students, and responded
with both informational and instrumental support. As one supporter said: “I would really comment
if I had some value to add - if I had a question that I thought they should consider or a connection
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CheerOn: Facilitating Online Social Support for Novice Project-Based Learning Teams 32:23
that I knew if I could help them.” Supporters who felt that they had informational or instrumental
support to share were more likely to participate. Another supporter noted that she was eager to
oer informational support when she saw that the team was facing a problem that she knew a
lot about. As she expressed: “There was one stand that I saw people had commented on and then I
jumped in on it. I saw the question about blockers. . . I had some experience with that. . . I felt really
good being able to share that with them. Felt like easy pickings.” This supporter was motivated by
the fact that she could share something that she knew about and it was an easy way for her to
oer informational support.
Supporters perception of their ability to provide social support was inuenced by the examples
of previous social support comments given by others online. Supporters were also motivated to
give informational and instrumental support when they felt that they had something new to add
that was not already being voiced. Members noted that they were eager to participate when they
had something they felt they could share and the proper skills or experiences to help. However,
when members were not clear what the students needed or didn’t feel like the students needed
informational or instrumental support, they were less likely to help.
Supporters participated when they felt like the team genuinely needed help. If the team noted
that they were doing ne, they felt less obliged to give them informational or instrumental sup-
port. As one community member who does design research work stated: Theysay:“Wereontrack.
We’re good” so it makes me think they’re ne–it keeps saying ‘Oh we’re ne, we’re ne, we’re ne’.
If they said ‘Oh no, we’re struggling with this’, what information can I give them to help them.” We
found that even when students were struggling, they often reported that they were “on track”,
which confused supporters trying to oer social support. As another community member ex-
pressed: “If it looked like they were doing ne, I just kind of let them go. If there were times when I felt
they needed a little booster...” Itwasharder forme though... Ifelt the team isstruggling morethan I
expected. I think there’s nothing I can do via [online support] to help them, in that sense, it was much
more benecial for me to sit down in person and give insights that way.” Supporters were not always
sure of what exact challenges the students were facing and where they needed informational or in-
strumental support. Informational and instrumental support, as well as other forms, was thus inu-
enced by whether supporters had a clear understanding of the project and the needs of the students.
We also found that supporters often didn’t want to simply give vague appraisal support, but
wanted to give more direct informational or instrumental support that they felt could help the
team meet their needs. Despite this desire, supporters tended to give appraisal support rather than
other forms of social support.
Supporters could not always tell what help was needed, negatively inuencing the instrumental
or informational help they oered. As one supporter stated, “It’s hard for me to directly give useful
feedback without having more context.” Some students said that they were working on the same
thing from the day before. Thus, supporters were not always sure what had changed between
the days. As another supporter stated, “But sometimes it’s a little unclear to know the dierence
between their stands [progress posts]. It takes a bit more eort.” Supporters were not always sure
where students were in their project process and what they needed help on. This inuenced their
willingness to oer informational and instrumental support. The vagueness of the progress posts
frequently left supporters unsure how they could actually give instrumental or informational help.
As one supporter who was a graduate researcher familiar with the design process stated, “What’s
missing in this daily process is specicity in terms of what exactly they’re doing. The stands are
so vague so it’s hard to pinpoint what they’re working on and need help with.” Some supporters
struggled to understand what the students were saying through their daily posts and updates.
Another supporter stated: “If I had been given some kind of notication that this is something they
need help or feedback on. This would help with giving them a frame for what they need help on.”
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32:24 E. Harburg et al.
Table 5. Stands were more Likely than to-do Posts to Elicit the Types of Social
Support that Provide useful Feedback and Resources
Reply to Emotional
Support
Instrumental
Support
Informational
Support
Appraisal support of. . . Total
value work person
Stand 20 20 62 570 3180
To- do 1 0 1 0 34 036
Supporters were not always sure what kind of help was needed, which inuenced their willingness
to give positive support and participate within the online community.
Stands were more likely than to-dos to elicit instrumental or informational support. Support-
ers provided instrumental or informational support in response to a stand more often than to a
to-do post (Table 5). When supporters responded to to-do posts, it was almost exclusively with a
form of appraisal support. Whereas when supporters responded to stands, it was typically with in-
strumental or informational support. In other words, stands elicited informational or instrumental
support whereas completed to-do posts did not. This is likely because to-do posts do not surface
any problems or need for help, so appraisal support is the only type of support that supporters can
provide in direct response to the post.
4.4.2.4 Condition 4: Supporter Received Gratitude for Previous Social Support. When external
supporters felt that the students appreciated their eorts, they felt more willing to oer additional
social support. This social support came in all forms, but was often increased emotional support
given to students.
Supporters were more likely to provide social support when students responded to or expressed
gratitude for their comments. As one supporter for the diabetes team stated: “I went back to the
[online community] to see if there were any responses. But then I saw that someone who had read the
post had responded and said, ‘Hey, thanks so much’ and that felt really good. I went back and was
eager to see whether my input was considered. . . After that I started to read the stands again. I became
re-interested again.” Another member said that he felt good knowing he was in dialogue with the
members of the team he was supporting. As he remarked: “Having someone respond in text felt
good. It was like we were engaging in a conversation.. . Made me feel good that they appreciated it.”
Supporters felt higher levels of social support when students gave them some type of recognition,
such as appraisal support for their eorts.
When supporters did not receive a like or reply from students for instrumental or informational
support they oered, they wondered if their social support was actually seen. As one member
stated: “I was really curious ‘are they even going to see this?’ That demotivated me a little bit. Even if
I gave them [appraisal support]. . . then they wouldn’t see it.” Another supporter noted that she was
unable to know if she was being helpful when she didn’t hear back from the students. As she said,
Well no one is responding to me, I have no way to know if it’s useful.” We also had several instances
where supporters asked questions or made comments and no one replied to them. This led them
to feel less willing to give social support to students via CheerOn. There were only a few scenarios
where supporters did not care if they received conrmation. One community member commented:
It would be nice if they responded but I’m just putting out there to take it or leave it. It wouldn’t make
a dierence to me. Unless they want to have a conversation.” This instance tended to be far less
common than those who felt oended if no one responded to the instrumental or informational
support they oered and decided in turn to stop oering instrumental or informational support in
the future.
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CheerOn: Facilitating Online Social Support for Novice Project-Based Learning Teams 32:25
Supporters who didn’t feel that their informational or instrumental support was helpful to stu-
dents had less desire to participate afterwards. For example, one supporter who gave informational
support to her team became frustrated when the social support didn’t seem to help the team and
they expressed continually having the same issue. As she stated: “I saw that they were struggling
with the same issue [supporter had given team informational support on before]. I thought maybe
they need more support but at that point I didn’t feel as motivated to help again, I guess it was de-
motivating to see that my support didn’t help them.” In this scenario, she was both upset that she
couldn’t help and she felt that the team was neglecting to follow her informational support. This
led her to stop participating within the online community. In addition, some supporters did not
participate because they didn’t feel like their informational support would help. As one member
explained: “Having been on design students as mentor and participant, the kind of feedback they’re
getting is truly dependent on the feedback process and whom they are giving it to. I don’t feel they
have any connection with me. It’s hard to believe anything I’m saying is benecial.” Overall, our re-
sults showed that if a supporter did not feel that their informational or instrumental support had
been noticed or heard, they were more likely to feel less motivated to give online social support
and would give less time-consuming appraisal support as a result.
4.4.3 Analysis 3: The Lead’s Goals to Provide Social Support. While CheerOn was designed to
promote social support from recruited supporters, the undergraduate studio lead unexpectedly
provided more social support than any other group including recruited supporters, coaches, and
managers, so we ask: why did the studio lead to provide social support?
4.4.3.1 Studio Lead Goal 1: Boost Morale. The studio lead saw her role as monitoring teams
in order to provide social support, particularly emotional and appraisal, to boost their morale,
which CheerOn allowed her to do: “For the most part it has been one of the more memorable parts
of my Loft experience this summer. I think in part because it’s part of my role in overseeing them.
So, I’m reading their stands and motivating them and trying to create a positive environment. So, I
think it’s particularly helpful for me, or those in a similar position of mine.” The lead saw social
support, particularly in the forms of appraisal and emotional support, as a humorous way to boost
morale. She saw boosting morale as her responsibility: “My role is so much more focused on what
their experience is like. Since that’s my role I’m more attuned to morale boosting.” At rst, cheers
provided a humorous, gratuitous way to provide support: “It kind of started as a joke - [students]
were like ‘oh we just got cheered,’ which I thought was awesome, it got them to laugh.” However, it
became a useful way to show support: “Why I’ve been doing it a lot is that it gets them to smile but it
lets them know that I see how much work they’re doing and notice how awesome it is.” The lead could
perform this role through generic posts as well: “I realized [team members] were low on morale so I
went in to post a more ‘great work, keep it up’ and that was more on a post. Why I did that separate
fromacheerwasbecause I didnthaveaspecicto-do ...I wasnt posting advice or suggestions, it was
just wholly for the sake of boosting morale.” Providing social support thus provided a convenient
online means of helping boost student persistence: “I think cheering or posting some sort of morale
has been a good account of that.”
4.4.3.2 Studio Lead Goal 2: Providing Assistance. The lead also used CheerOn to provide more
substantive informational and instrumental support to students. As she reported: “I’m not picky
about my likes but denitely with commenting if they have an obstacle that I can help with, I will
comment, or if there is an obstacle that I can help with. I will elaborate and say, hey I can help with
this.” This informational and instrumental support often started a face-to-face interaction. As the
leadexplained: “Itryto...comment onthat to create aconversation.Forexample,afterone team
was disheartened after a critique session, the lead attempted to normalize the situation and oer
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emotional and informational support online to the team: “I felt like it was kind of necessary to be
like ‘brainstorming can be frustrating’ and trying to follow-up the conversation we had, which was
like what can we do to get better feedback from crit.
4.4.3.3 Studio Lead Goal 3: Support Routine. CheerOn became an online complement to the on-
going support routine of the lead. The lead reported using both online and oine for monitoring
teams: “I kind of do both. I check in with the teams regularly and a few times throughout the day. I feel
most of my time is spent checking in with the teams.” The online system provided another support
channel: “I try to change their Loft pages every few days and cheering is a part of that. Just every
couple of days I’ll cheer a few things. So for the most part it’s just been generally pretty routine.”
4.4.4 Analysis 4: The Eect of Social Support on Students. Analysis 1 found that external sup-
porters did indeed provide social support and analysis 2 and 3 identied factors that inuenced
supporters’ behavior, but we must also ask: how did receiving social support impact PBL students’
self-ecacy, impacting persistence and ultimately progress? In this section we will show how we
found that receiving appraisal support helped to increase students’ perceived value of their project
work, inuencing their work persistence; and instrumental, informational, and emotional support,
helped students to feel a sense of progress, greater identity in the community, and lowered hier-
archical barriers within the community which increased online and oine help-seeking.
4.4.4.1 Social Support Increased Perceived Value of Project Work. Students perceived their project
as valuable when online supporters and community members wrote comments oering emotional
and appraisal support on the activity feed. One student said about receiving online social support
through the tool, “It makes you think that people care about what [the work] you’re doing.” This ap-
praisal support also led the students to feel that they were not alone in caring about their topic. As
one student working on the diabetes project,“[Receiving appraisal support] facilitated this [online]
atmosphere that you are doing something and what you are doing is important.”
The number of external supporters magnied this eect. One member on the diabetes’ team
highlighted how seeing the large number of online supporters led him to feel that he was mak-
ing a real-world impact. As he stated, “Because so many people cared about this project [online]
and it feels that I am making a dierence.” Teams noted that seeing the number of followers sup-
porting their project online was impactful for recognizing how many people valued their work,
which made them feel that they were making more impact. As a student working on the food truck
project remarked about being a part of the online community stated, “It [appraisal support] made
me realize that other people [online supporters] actually really, really cared about all these [food] is-
sues.” Through receiving appraisal support, students better recognized that other people also felt
that their problem was meaningful to a larger community working towards a big problem. The
fact that support came from external supporters also mattered. As one student said: “When some-
one comments on your page that you don’t necessarily know, it’s more.. . encouragement.” Another
student pointed out a similar feeling related to receiving appraisal support from strangers:“The
fact that people we don’t even know are interested in our problem.. . The fact that an entire network
of [the national student design network] people were following your project [online], that made it feel
more ocial.”
Dedicated, open, online space for project content and comments from online supporters and
community members increased the students’ perceived value of the project: “I felt that the [web-
site] sort of gave that feeling of importance to whatever I was doing, especially since there’s a whole
site devoted to whatever project you’re doing. A page with your specic feedback questions that you
could modify or your own [to do list] for instance.” Receiving appraisal support from an extended
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CheerOn: Facilitating Online Social Support for Novice Project-Based Learning Teams 32:27
network helped to increase students’ perceived value of their project work, inuencing their work
persistence.
4.4.4.2 Social Support Increased Perceived Progress. Although the social support features were
designed to enlist external supporters to motivate progress (Amabile 2011), which in turn should
have boosted student self-ecacy and in turn increased persistence (Bandura 1994), online social
support aected progress in a dierent way. Making progress explicit increased students’ public
commitment, and more detailed descriptions of obstacles elicited substantive instrumental and in-
formational support from supporters on what to do next, which helped students make and perceive
progress.
Appraisal of work and emotional support did not always seem to encourage progress as might
be expected from social models of motivation and work on online communities. For example,
unlike Wikipedia Barnstars, appraisal support did not seem to provide a strong extrinsic incentive
for PBL teams, likely because teams are already highly intrinsically motivated to work on their
design projects (Restivo and Rjit 2012). Social support in the form of emotional or appraisal support
seemed to function similar to praise (Hattie and Timerley 2007) that is, they did not provide useful
or believable information useful for making progress. As one student stated: “I think just the types
of comments. . . like, “Oh, great job,” like, “Looks like you guys are doing really well.” Yeah, like they
just didntsayanything that substantial...”Or as another student said in reference to less specic,
impersonal comments: “It almost seems forced because comments that are a bit cheesy, at times.”
At other times, appraisal support did seem to positively aect students’ self-ecacy by helping
students judge their progress: it’s a “nice thing to see, like, oh, we’re on the right direction.” As
one student stated that appraisal support increased “condence in what we’re doing, that we know
what we’re doing, .. . that we’re working towards this goal and it’s going to be ne”. This student
reinforced that appraisal support helped students to feel that they were working on the right path
and that “things would be okay.” In these cases, appraisal support helped them feel like they were
successfully taking steps toward their end goal.
Whether or not students found appraisal support benecial, tracking progress online did increase
public commitment. Posting progress did help students track and publicly commit to their work.
Students noted how posting their work online helped them to keep track of their results: “Seeing
[goals online] there and saying that these are my goals for the week, in a way, it makes it easier to track
them and create a schedule.” This visible record in turn created public commitment, as one student
said: “As a team, having it as a public record matters, I think it’s important to have accountability.. .
it’s more measurable.”
Receiving instrumental and informational support (rather than appraisal of work and emotional
support) inuenced perceived progress. More importantly, when supporters were able to under-
stand students’ work and provide substantive assistance, this both helped students make progress
and increased expectancies. One student said that it was encouraging to receive specic informa-
tional and appraisal support on their work, “When people [online supporters] gave positive critiques
that were substantive rather than commenting on smaller things, that indicated that we were on the
right track.” Other teams also noted that it was motivating getting feedback on their work. As
one student stated, “Having people who just see the work that is on the activity feed and give you
feedback. . . it’s nice. It’s that extra motivation, like good job.”
Oering social support, particularly instrumental or informational support, was contingent on
understanding students’ progress, which was often dicult. Some students did not feel that sup-
porters cared about their small wins or accomplishments. As one student stated about to-do posts,
“Nobody cares about our small steps forward.” Some commented that they were unsure who was
actually looking at their page particularly the case when they didn’t receive comments. However,
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many of the recruited supporters’ comments were non-specic appraisal support on work (e.g.,
“good job”) and that supporters often reported diculty understanding teams’ progress: As one
supporter stated, “It’s hard for me to directly give useful feedback without having more context.” or,
. . . sometimes it’s a little unclear to know the dierence between their stands [progress posts]. It takes
a bit more eort.” Or “What’s missing in this daily process is specicity in terms of what exactly they’re
doing. The stands are so vague so it’s hard to pinpoint what they’re working on and need help with.”
Even if supporters did care about teams’ progress, they would not be able to provide substantive
feedback if they could not understand the progress made. By this interpretation, external online
social support may indeed aect progress and expectancies through surfacing students’ work to
supporters in a way that allows them to provide substantive informational or instrumental support.
4.4.4.3 Social Support Increased Community Identity. Appraisal support increased students’
connection to the larger design network and community. As one student stated about receiving
appraisal support from a mentor, “It kind of makes it bigger than just our team or just [design pro-
gram]. . . Like what we’re doing, the work we’re doing.. . It makes it more part of [the national student
design network] as a whole.” This team noted how using CheerOn to receive appraisal support made
their project work feel beyond their own team and part of a larger community. Another student
said in that after receiving emotional support from supporters in the form of welcoming to the
community and expressions of empathy for the design process: Idenitelyfeltthatitmademe
more a part of the [national design network] community.”
Emotionally supportive comments expressing care led students to feel comfortable in the com-
munity and inuenced engagement in their project work. One student described the experience of
receiving a comment that expressed their care for the students as it inuenced her comfort level
and engagement. She said that receiving the emotional support comment impacted her “comfort
level, knowing that these people are encouraging us, like are participating, like cool things coming out
of this, I think that is what makes me more engaged with the project itself.” This demonstrates that
students felt more engaged in their project work through receiving emotional support from others
via CheerOn.
Through greater comfort in the community, students reported feeling more connected to the
design network community as a result of receiving social support via CheerOn. As one student
stated about a comment from a high-status person in the community, “I denitely felt that it made
me more a part of the [design network] community.” When students received social support from
others, they felt greater connection to the community. However, some students reported that they
still did not know who was giving them social support. As one student said, “It’d be more helpful
if we actually knew who they [online supporters] were sometimes.” This suggests that social support
comments were not as meaningful to students when they came from strangers, given that they did
not feel they fully understood their work and cared about them personally.
Beyond the internal network of support, appraisal, emotional, instrumental, and informational
support helped students feel that there was a larger pool of social support online. As one student
stated, “I feel like classes generally had a instructor or a TA to go to, so the pool of resources was
less . . . I guess the po ol [online community], like a bigger community.” This student demonstrates
how social support facilitated the sense of a larger community of social support, beyond their
internal network.
4.4.4.4 Social Supported Increased Help-seeking. Social support built community bonds that, to
a limited extent, increased help-seeking. Building bonds between teams and external community
members led to surprising benets that students explicitly sought help face-to-face.
Students reported that receiving only social support led them to feel that they were a part of
a supportive community who wanted to help them. As one student stated about receiving social
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CheerOn: Facilitating Online Social Support for Novice Project-Based Learning Teams 32:29
support, particularly in the forms of instrumental and informational support, “It [social support]
gave me a better idea that [design network] is more of a network of people who are helping each other.”
Social support helped to facilitate a culture where students felt part of a community whom they
could reach out to for help.
Through receiving social support comments, particularly instrumental and informational sup-
port, from online supporters, students reported feeling more capable to ask for help. As a student
working on the food project remarked about being a part of the online community, “It makes asking
for help easier .. . Even though we’re not always talking to them, it’s like they’re there, so we should be
able to ask help if we want.” This student demonstrates that social support helped facilitate greater
convenience for asking for help as well as an increased perception of supporters being willing to
help them.
Online introductions demonstrating emotional support by supporters helped to make students
feel comfortable asking for help. As one student said, “Knowing that there were people [online sup-
porters] who had introduced themselves [online] at some point, made it easier to reach out.” Students
reported feeling more comfortable asking for help when there was some sort of connection built
online between students and supporters stating their emotional support and willingness to give
instrumental and/or informational support. We had some comments that when students did not
know who was providing social support for them, these comments had less value given that they
seemed more articial.
Expressions of emotional, instrumental, and informational support helped break down hierar-
chy and led students to feel they could reach out to more experienced members of the broader
community. As one student working on the diabetes project stated, “I think it [receiving social sup-
port] makes it less of a hierarchy, I guess, in a way that you can interact with anyone.. . it’s more like
just go to anyone for help. They all are able to contribute in some way or another.” Another student
armed that help-seeking came more easily after receiving social support comments online: “It
makes the whole asking and communicating with superiors easier.” This helps demonstrate that so-
cial support helped make superiors more approachable to students. Receiving social support from
higher status members shows students that these members were “willing to give their resources.”
We didn’t nd evidence of the contrary.
As a result, supportive comments that demonstrated emotional, instrumental, and informational
support led to instances of in-person help-seeking by students to supporters. One student from the
diabetes project team explained that a supporter oering informational support led to an in-person
meeting. As they stated, “Well, when [design network leader] commented on our [team page], she
posted a comment about us interacting with our community partners. That sort of brought something
up, just like we started talking about it. And then eventually, we were like, ‘Oh, well let’s just go
talk to [the network leader] in person,’ so we brought her in . . . I think the [social support] comments
sort of facilitated it as an implicit, like, ‘Hey, if you have more questions, you can talk to us.’ . . . the
comment was kind of the reason that there was the connection there.” Here social support in the form
of informational support helped to establish communication channels. This in turn led project
students to feel more willing to go in and ask for help and receive in-person feedback providing
the team with new insights for their project work.
However, online social support did not fully remove barriers to help-seeking for all students. It is
important to note that some students still expressed ambivalence about asking strangers for help.
As one student working on the diabetes project stated, “You don’t really ask strangers for help. You’d
rather ask people that you interact with a lot or someone that you’ve been commenting with.” This
reinforces that, despite receiving online support, some students still preferred to ask for help from
those who was familiar. We coded all comments using a Codebook Manual (see appendix), which
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Fig. 6. CheerOn facilitated social support, which increased persistence through heightening the perceived
value of the project rather than students’ expectancies, while the connection to external supporters unex-
pectedly facilitated face-to-face help-seeking and a stronger identification with the community.
helped us to identify what categories of social support each comment t into. When the comments
provided sucient detail, we would code them according to the social support category that they
t into based on House’s 1981 denition. We found no negative comments posted using CheerOn.
We believe this was the case because it was a system specically designed to support positive
comments.
4.5 Discussion
Study 2 asked: (RQ2) How might we design a socio-technical system that incorporates external
supporters to provide social support to increase student persistence in PBL environments? We
predicted that a system that externalized teams’ progress would prompt online supporters to pro-
vide social support, and that this social support would motivate students to make progress in their
work. We found that the CheerOn system did indeed successfully prompt social support that teams
found benecial (Figure 6). The CheerOn system succeeded in increasing social support for PBL
students. The combination of engaging teams in useful project management practices that exter-
nalize progress and minimal prompting was sucient to enlist the online, external community of
supporters in providing support. Supporters were motivated by predictable factors such as their
identication with the community, social facilitation (peer pressure), clear needs for help, relevant
expertise, familiarity, and students heeding informational or instrumental support.
However, there were also a number of surprises. First, the surprising amount of social support
provided by the lead, and to a lesser extent, the coaches. We had assumed that instructors would
not have time to provide social support, based on Study 1 and previous research on PBL, thus
the need for an online community to provide social support. However, it seemed that in provid-
ing the tools to elicit social support from recruited supporters, CheerOn also lowered the barrier
for the lead to provide social support, which she saw as part of her responsibility as an instructor.
The lead and coaches provided social support even without being explicitly asked.
Second, teams often desired substantive informational support that would provide feedback on
what to do next. While the system was designed to surface completed to-dos to elicit social support,
these to-do posts elicited primarily appraisal support rather than substantive feedback. Rather, the
stand posts, which eectively surfaced problems, showed clear help needs that were more likely
to elicit substantive informational support. Appraisal support did sometimes give teams a sense of
progress that increased self-ecacy, but it sometimes was perceived as unhelpful or too supercial
to be credible.
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CheerOn: Facilitating Online Social Support for Novice Project-Based Learning Teams 32:31
Third, social support increased persistence through increasing the perceived value of the project,
rather than through increasing team’s expectancies. Social support in PBL functions dierently
than in online communities where it encourages members to perform small tasks they would
not already do–as shown by Study 1, PBL teams persist in their project work even in absence
of social support, albeit with decision uncertainty and stress. Nor does it have as little eect as
praise had in a classroom, as predicted by learning sciences research (Hattie and Timerley 2007).
In this PBL environment where students are motivated by, but have serious doubts about, their
project’s real-world impact, appraisal support from external supporters signal that the project
is important enough to warrant the attention of an external audience, increasing the value of
the goal and thus students’ persistence. While substantive appraisal and emotional feedback on
progress (indicating mastery or nearness to goal) can also increase persistence (Amabile 2011), the
appraisal and emotional support comments given on CheerOn were sometimes too supercial to
communicate this progress, likely in part because the externalizations of progress did not provide
sucient detail to supporters.
Fourth, social support also resulted in unexpected positive side eects such as in-person help-
seeking and community commitment. Providing a community of external supporters to oer
emotional, appraisal, informational, or instrumental support helped to increase the psychological
safety (Edmondson 2006) of asking external supporters for help. When external supporters became
aware of the need for help, they often oered to help students. This, in turn, led to students being
willing to ask for instrumental or informational support. There were several scenarios where stu-
dents reached out to supporters only after a simple introduction on CheerOn, but most help came
from formal oerings to provide informational or instrumental support. Furthermore, students re-
ported that receiving social support, particularly emotional and appraisal support, from external
supporters made them identify more strongly to the larger design community. This stronger sense
of identity in the community increases the likelihood that they would participate in the larger PBL
network and is itself an important learning goal in adopting an identity of an innovator.
Nevertheless, there is room for substantial improving of the intervention. Most notably, sup-
porters often wanted to give more substantive informational and instrumental support to students,
instead of merely appraisal of work such as “good job,” – though research does suggest that even
a ‘like’ of validation on Facebook can be of value to users’ self-esteem (Scissors et al. 2016). Part of
the diculty of supporters providing substantive informational and instrumental support was that
the externalizations of progress were not always clear to supporters, and students did not always
accurately articulate obstacles. Furthermore, even when supporters gave substantive instrumental
or informational support, students did not always heed this social support, decreasing supporters’
motivation to provide social support. In addition, both students and supporters reported hesitancy
communicating with strangers, perhaps impeding a greater amount of help-seeking and giving.
5 GENERAL DISCUSSION
5.1 Key Findings
This project explored the potential of online communities to provide social support to motivate
students in real-world, PBL environments.
Study 1 asked: (RQ1) Do students in PBL environments working on real-world problems receive
sucient social support to sustain persistence? Study 1 found that, given the large orchestrations
burden on the peer instructor facilitating the PBL environments, students do not feel that they re-
ceive sucient social support. Unfortunately, this is compounded by the fact that students do not
explicitly ask for help or spontaneously externalize their progress so that instructors and coaches
can provide appropriate social support. Study 1 thus corroborates that expected challenges of
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32:32 E. Harburg et al.
real-world PBL (Solomon 2003) do indeed arise in a PBL environment. Based on the needs iden-
tied in Study 1, Study 2 then asked: (RQ2) How might we design a technical system that initiates
externalizing team’s progress prompt social support, and how does this in turn motivate students to
make progress?
The CheerOn system was intended to enlist outside supporters to provide cheers as a way to
highlight progress and increase persistence. The system successfully elicited social support that
positively impacted students, but often in unexpected ways. First, CheerOn facilitated social sup-
port not just from recruited supporters, but also from the peer instructor and professional coaches
for whom the system oered another channel by which to perform their roles of monitoring and
supporting teams. Second, CheerOn stand posts elicited instrumental support from supporters
through externalizing problems. Third, appraisal support did not provide much of an extrinsic
reward, sometimes increased self-ecacy, and more importantly, increased the perceived value of
the project, especially when from an unfamiliar external supporter. Fourth, by connecting students
to external supporters, students built bonds to the larger design community, which they reported
increased their likelihood of explicitly seeking help (unlike Study 1).
Of course, there is also room for improvement. The system was not designed to specically ad-
dress many of the factors that inuenced supporters to provide the right kind of social support.
Specically, the system was not designed to inuence social facilitation (peer pressure) among
supporters, consistently make student help needs and progress clear to supporters, or suciently
encourage students to thank or show how they heeded assistance, all factors that inuence whether
supporters provide social support. Thus, accounting for our ndings related to the way users ex-
perienced CheerOn and “designing the user experience” to allow a greater feeling of appreciation
could be of use to improve this system in the future (Forlizzi and Ford 2000, p. 419; Zimmerman
et al. 2007).
Nevertheless, these ndings point towards a clear dierence between how to design online com-
munities for blended PBL environments. Whereas “likes” and “barnstars” can serve as eective
extrinsic incentives in communities such as Facebook and Wikipedia (Restivo and Rjit 2012; Burke
et al. 2009; Scissors et al. 2016), these are not eective strategies for blended learning community
platforms where participants have very dierent needs and relations to supporters. In the social
media and peer production platforms described in related research (Restivo and Rjit 2012; Burke
et al. 2009; Scissors et al. 2016), participants do not have diculty making contributions such as
posting pictures or making edits–the problem is simply to increase activity on the platform by
incentivizing them to do so, often through public recognition. In PBL however, students’ great-
est needs concern ambiguity about whether their oine work is succeeding, how to work more
successfully, and overcoming the motivational challenges associated with real-world project work
(Blumenfeld et al. 1991). Therefore, online social support communities for PBL need to instead
focus on helping students see the value of their work to a larger community, help them surface
problems so that supporters provide substantive assistance, and demonstrate that supporters are
eager for students to ask for help (online or oine).
5.2 Design Implications
The needs of PBL environments suggest that social support communities for blended PBL would do
better to utilize external supporters within online communities to assist in oering social support
for students, as opposed to encouraging social recognition as an extrinsic incentive as in other
online communities.
We propose that the system should engage students in intrinsically motivating practices that
externalize progress to an online community of supporters (which students will not do through
explicit help-seeking) who are then likely to provide social support. It is also important for such
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CheerOn: Facilitating Online Social Support for Novice Project-Based Learning Teams 32:33
platforms is to apply a principle of educing requests, in which the system should engage students in
intrinsically motivating practices whose side eect is to externalize progress to an online commu-
nity of external supporters so that they oer assistance, thus, overcoming students’ initial aversion
to help-seeking to crowdsource help-giving. The implications of these nding extend beyond the
PBL context to provide social support for others experiencing trying experiences where social sup-
port is helpful – from medical patients and families in need of social support as they go through a
trying operation, to entrepreneurs running stressful crowdfunding campaigns, political candidates
in need of social support to endure challenging elections, individuals in need of social support as
they work through addictions, or individuals working on stressful projects in a company in need
of social support, to name a few.
These studies provide a grounded causal model explaining the mechanisms by which blended
PBL environments communities can “jump-start” help seeking. While novices show initial reluc-
tance to surface problems and seek help (Argyris and Schon 1974), indirectly surfacing problems
to external supporters through stands prompted support to provide assistance. This help-giving
built bonds-based commitments to the larger community which, in turn, facilitated explicit help-
seeking. The model also bridges HCI and Learning Sciences literature by showing where we can
apply well-researched CSCW principles for promoting online contributions (Kraut et al. 2012)and
well-researched LS principles for scaolding more substantive feedback and learning. The process
model of social support (Figure 3), and analysis of remaining obstacles from Study 2, point to a
number of specic design recommendations (Table 6).
Based on this model, a principle of educing help-requests, how might we redesign the online social
support system?
5.2.1 Distribute Orchestration Burden (Features 1–2, Table 6). Online communities of exter-
nal supporters promise to reduce the orchestration burden of PBL environments (Mergendoller
and Thomas 2005; Dillenbourg and Jermann 2010). Research in CSCL and CHI has shown that
help can be distributed to other peers in the community within online learning communities
(Bruckman 2006; Kizilcec and Schneider 2015), but less is understood about how this might work
within a blended learning context and the eects of calling on specic people to support through-
out a research project. This study shows that PBL classes can utilize external supports to distrib-
ute the instructors’ task of providing social support. However, given the amount of social support
provided by those who assume instructional responsibility (leads, coaches, and managers) com-
munity managers may do better to reframe the supporters’ role to that of assistant coaches and
perhaps even focus eort on recruiting experienced coaches. The amount of social support pro-
vided by coaches implies that even a small number of online assistant coaches could result in
greater amount of social support. Program alumnae might fulll this role well. For example, the
studio lead suggested that senior undergraduate leaders in the design network see their role as
curating teams’ experience and seek greater interaction with teams, and online coaching provided
a desirable channel for them to carry out this role. In this study, managers’ reminders seemed to
be sucient to encourage recruited supporters to provide social support, so future systems might
automate this prompting to reduce the orchestration burden on PBL teachers. This includes track-
ing which supporters do not provide social support and surfacing social loang to the manager
only when automated prompting fails.
5.2.2 Community-based Social Support (Features 3–5, Table 6). CSCW research suggests that
familiarity increases contribution within online communities and that people tend to relate and
connect with others similar to them online (Bachrach et al. 2012; Sosik and Bazarova 2014). Our
ndings build on this work suggesting that connecting PBL students to external supporters re-
quires drawing on people with related interests and a sense of project familiarity. Teams described
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Table 6. Proposed Features to Improve Usability of an Online Social Support System Based on the Needs
and Rationales Found in Study 2 Related to (a) Distributing the Orchestration Burden, (b) Providing
Community-Based Social Support, (c) Externalizing Student Help Needs, (d) Encouraging
Supporters to Provide Social Support, and (e) Increasing Guidance for Supporters Related
to How to Give Specific Social Support
Need Rationale from Study 2 Feature
(a) Distribute orchestration burden
1Distribute
coaching
Study 2 found that leads and
coaches provided a great deal of
assistance.
Recruiting coaches – reframe supporters
task as coaching rather than oering
social support and focus eorts on
recruiting coaches.
2 Reduce
orchestration
burden of
prompting
System required manual
prompting by manager and
found some supporters cheered
infrequently.
Automated management – rather than
have community manager track and
remind supporters, could automatically
track and prompt. Escalate to manager
only when prompts fail.
(b) Community-based social support
3 Highlight
support
network to
teams
Students were motivated by
being part of community.
Highlight network – show students
larger community and network
supporters and connect teams working
on similar topics.
4 Highlight
support given
to teams
The quantity of social support
increased the perceived value of
the student’s project.
Highlight social support – highlight
cumulative number of followers and
cheers.
5 Facilitate
bonds
Lack of familiarity hindered
help-seeking and social support.
Supporter matchmaking – match
supporters and teams by interest and
facilitate more extensive introductions
and discussion perhaps through
face-to-face or video meeting.
(c) Externalize help needs to supporters
6 Externalize
progress
Supporters didn’t understand
what progress students were
making and thus could not give
feedback on progress.
Stand goals – expand stands to also
externalize current goals, tasks
completed and tasks remaining to give
better indications of progress.
7 Externalize
help needs
Supporters didn’t understand
what help students needed and
students would not always
surface obstacles in stands.
Stand obstacles – expand stand by
requiring students to explain the lack of
progress to better surface help needs.
8 Externalize
aect
Students valued messages that
it will be OK” but only
communicate anxiety
face-to-face.
Stand aect – need to better encourage
help-seeking and sharing of
vulnerabilities
(d) Encourage supporters to provide social support
9 Increase
perceived
bonds-based
commitments
Expertise, identication to
community, and impact on
teams all increase contributions,
but supporters sometimes did
not perceive these factors.
Highlight bonds – highlight personal
factors in prompts to provide support,
remind supporters of their expertise,
their connection to the design
community, and their impact on teams.
(Continued)
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CheerOn: Facilitating Online Social Support for Novice Project-Based Learning Teams 32:35
Table 6. Continued
Need Rationale from Study 2 Feature
10 Increase social
facilitation
(peer pressure)
Supporters more likely to
provide social support when
they see other supporters
providing support.
Highlight social facilitation – highlight
other’s social support using prompts to
provide support, show leaderboard of
supporters.
11 Increasing
thanks
Supporters more likely to
provide social support when
teams heed their advice.
Prompt thanks – prompt/scaold teams
to thank supporters.
(e) Shift from vague appraisal support to more specic instrumental or informational support
12 Scaold value.
Facilitate
face-to-face
help
Supporters and teams both
wanted more substantive social
support beyond cheers, which
research indicates promotes
greater learning and progress.
Prompt substantive assistance – rather
than simply scaold cheers, scaold
supporters to also convey: the value of
project; feedback on task, process and
regulation; that on track and not to
worry; oers of help; and need for
clarication.
the importance of getting social support from a larger community of people with similar inter-
ests. This might be enhanced by better visualizing the network of external supporters to teams;
highlighting the cumulative amount of support provided by the network; facilitating bonds-based
commitments (familiarity) between individual students and supporters; by facilitating a more ex-
tensive introduction process; and perhaps by matchmaking between teams and recruited support-
ers. Perceiving the network and identity- and bonds-based connections to the network all posi-
tively aected social support and persistence and the system could highlight these factors to more
quickly impact teams.
5.2.3 Externalize Help Needs to Supporters (Features 6–8, Table 6). Students and supporters de-
sired more substantive social support (such as the sorts of feedback known to enhance performance
and learning), but supporters were unable to understand enough about teams’ current status to
provide that support. Past research suggests that externalizing specic questions can help students
initiate answers (Klemmer and Carroll 2014; Sawyer 2005, 2008), but this can be dicult in PBL
settings when students are unsure of how to ask or have diculty publicly saying that they need
help. We found that with relatively small modications, the system could externalize more useful
information to supporters. This should include externalizing: high-level goals; tasks completed and
remaining show progress; clearer descriptions of obstacles by asking students to explain progress;
and surfacing teams aective state to indicate when morale boosts are needed.
5.2.4 Encourage Supporters to Provide Social Support (Features 9–11, Table 6). Supporters are
more likely to provide social support when they see that they have relevant expertise, identify
with the larger community and understand the positive impact on teams. Past research in CSCW
suggests that interaction between users online can decrease over time and many users never in-
teract, thus, some sort of prompting or notication is important as a reminder (Viswanath et al.
2009; Resnik 2001). In addition, research suggests that users contribute more within online com-
munities when they feel that they can uniquely help others within a community (Ling et al. 2005).
We found that supporters could easily be reminded of these factors when they were prompted to
provide social support via e-mail and when they realized that students needed their unique exper-
tise. Likewise, supporters were also more likely to provide social support when they saw others
providing social support, which could be increased by displaying leaderboards of top supporters.
ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, Vol. 25, No. 6, Article 32. Publication date: December 2018.
32:36 E. Harburg et al.
More importantly, supporters were inuenced by teams that sought their advice, so it is impor-
tant for the system to also prompt teams to thank supporters the same way that supporters are
prompted to provide support.
5.2.5 Shi Non-specific Social Support to Substantive Informational and Instrumental Support
(Feature 12, Table 6). Students and supporters desired to receive and give more substantive infor-
mational and instrumental social support (such as the sort of feedback known to enhance perfor-
mance and learning) so it is important to allow and scaold social support beyond non-specic
appraisal support comments such as “Good job.” Research suggests that it’s hard to give honest and
good feedback (Miller et al. 2005), yet we found that creating more specic prompts conveying the
value of project; feedback on task, process and regulation; that are on track and not to worry; oers
of help; and need for clarication can help to increase more honest and specic social support.
This research helps to build our understanding of how to design features within socio-technical
systems that prompt external supporters to oer social support to PBL students. These features
can be applied to building social support systems for workers and users of all kinds. This research
also shows how online communities can provide emotional support for students that can help to
foster feelings of psychological safety (Edmondson 1999). The ndings provide evidence for the
fact that social support online can help to prompt feelings of safety and the perception that one is
able to take risks and thus ask for help.
5.3 Limitations
The need-nding (Study 1) and CheerOn design study (Study 2) provided an exploratory, com-
parative case study of how we might design hybrid online/oine communities to provide social
support to build self-ecacy, impacting persistence and ultimately progress. Future work should
address the methodological limitations of this exploratory, qualitative work, in several ways such
as providing additional measures of learning and interest, and eventually, should the results hold,
more rigorous study designs such as randomized controlled trials with pre- and post-treatment
measures. A related issue concerns students’ reactions to praise. Hattie and Timerley (2007) shows
us that non-specic praise is not helpful for learning, but research also suggests that the need to
feel a sense of social support and belonging from others is critical to persistence (Baumeister et al.
1995). Increased understanding related to the nuance of when non-specic social support can be
helpful or unhelpful will improve the eectiveness of building socio-technical tools that facilitate
social support.
The intervention presented in Study 2 also relied on researchers to manually track supporters’
participation and prompt them to provide social support. While this did not take an exorbitant
amount of time (approximately 2 hours for recruitment, 4.5 hours sending email reminders over
6 weeks), this time must be reduced suciently so the cost of managing the community is worth
the benets that social support provides in orchestrating and motivating students. In addition, re-
searchers contributed to upward of 35% of comments within the CheerOn tool, suggesting that
more support will need to be prompted by external supporters. Fortunately, most of this prompt-
ing can be automated (as described in the Design Implications 5.2) and future eld trials should
test whether this suciently reduces the teacher’s orchestration burden. Furthermore, researchers
participating in the intervention by helping provide social support is an additional limitation of
this study. We chose this method as it allowed us to ensure that students received sucient social
support according to our hypotheses. This is a common method for participatory action research
(PAR), where research is a collaborative, participatory process that requires involvement from the
community of interest as well as the researchers (Walker 1993). Furthermore, within intentionally
designed learning environments, instructors and TA will always be working behind the scenes,
similar to a community manager. Thus, we felt that this approach is less of a concern than if this
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CheerOn: Facilitating Online Social Support for Novice Project-Based Learning Teams 32:37
were a purely voluntary online community (where even there, the manager is often doing work to
encourage participation). In addition, as we were conducting the research, we were in the context.
Therefore, we felt that it could have been even more polluting to the results not to comment as it
might have been viewed as tacit disapproval of the system and of giving social support. Addition-
ally, we believed it to be more natural and realistic than students receiving support from articial
sources, such as Mechanical Turk workers (Deeets et al. 2015). Now that we know this general
design works, next we will test it with supporters’ independent of the researchers.
Finally, as described in the design implications section, future work should explore how to bet-
ter externalize teams’ progress and obstacles and how to scaold more substantive support. This
oers an opportunity to greatly increase the benets of social support for learning and design.
Nevertheless, this study provides an important starting point in exploring these interactions in
hybrid communities that value both design and learning.
6 CONCLUSIONS
Providing sucient social support to students in real-world PBL environments places a signif-
icant orchestration burden on instructors and is hindered by students’ reluctance to seek help.
However, this research suggests we may be able to use online communities to create blended
learning environments where students interact with an external online community to provide
social support for oine project work. This research shows that we can design such online com-
munities in which external supporters conveyed the value of students work to a larger community
through appraisal support; and facilitate PBL student help-seeking and a stronger sense of identity
in the community through emotional, instrumental, and informational support messages.
We can create these communities by applying a principle of educing help-requests and recruit-
ing a local community of supporters to oer online social support. Blended coaching platforms for
social support lower the bar for instructors, coaches, and supporters to provide social support; elicit
informational support by surfacing problems to supporters; motivate teams by showing the value
of their work to a larger community; and build social bonds that encourage explicit help-seeking
within the community. Such blended PBL communities have broad applications across higher ed-
ucation as well as any professional context in which innovators must improve their processes to
solve real-world problems.
APPENDIX A
Interview Protocol for CheerOn Students
CheerOn Hypotheses to test:
1. perceived community support / feeling valued – the work you’ve done is valued,
2. perceived progress,
3. perceived task direction,
4. perceived self-ecacy.
Analysis:
Observe how they use tool (# of cheers received, # of cheers given).
Code for key themes in interviews.
CheerOn Interview Questions:
1. Name/year? What project are you working on?
2. How have things been going thus far? How has it been using the Loft? Any changes this
week?
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32:38 E. Harburg et al.
3. How has it been doing stands? Using the workbench?
4. How did it feel getting cheers? Do you get this feedback often? Which input was most
helpful or unhelpful?
5. How did receiving cheers inuence your sense of the community, if at all?
6. Did receiving cheers inuence your behavior in any way?
7. How did this make you feel in terms of your ability as a designer?
8. How did seeing this feedback inuence your to-dos?
9. How did these comments inuence your sense of progress, if at all? How did this inuence
your sense of value of the tasks you completed? Did this change your perception of tasks
in any way?
CheerOn in Crit Interview Questions:
1. How helpful does the tool seem to be in showing your project’s next steps? How helpful
is this? Do you feel that you would use this tool? How could this tool be more useful in
showing you next steps?
2. How do you feel about the project steps that you have completed? (people are bad at
speculating– won’t be able to give you good information).
3. How does checking o tasks make you feel?
4. Do you feel that checking o task items will help you to feel motivated to complete your
goal?
5. How does using this tool inuence your relationship with your mentor?
6. Do you think that red light/green lights will help to motivate you to complete a goal?
7. Do you feel that email reminders are helpful in achieving a goal? When would you want
to be reminded of tasks?
8. How often would you want to be notied of completed tasks? Completed bigger goals?
9. What comments/shout-outs/cheers would you like to send to your team now? Would you
include a photo in your post?
10. How does knowing that other people have seen what you have done inuence your work?
11. How useful is the comment bar to you? Would you prefer “like” accomplishments, com-
ment,orcheerforthem?
APPENDIX B
Interview Protocol for CheerOn Supporters
1. How has cheering for your team been these past few weeks?
2. What has it been like to follow your team’s progress?
1. How often do you go on Loft? Why? What triggered it?
2. When was the last time you visited Loft?
1. What did you do?
2. How do you typically interact on Loft?
3. How do you decide to cheer for your team? (take me through the process)
1. What prompted/motivated you to cheer for the team? Why did you or did you not
cheer?
2. What features motivated you to cheer?
3. How do you decide when to cheer?
4. How do you decide what to cheer on? [Show them their cheers - why did you cheer on
this?]
4. How have you cheered for your team thus far?
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CheerOn: Facilitating Online Social Support for Novice Project-Based Learning Teams 32:39
1. How did you decide what to write for your cheer?
2. What informs your comment?
5. How does the activity feed inuence or not inuence your cheers?
1. Stands
2. Workbench
6. [If team has responded to cheer]
1. How did that feel?
2. Did that inuence your future cheers?
7. [If cheerers have responded to cheer]
1. How did that feel?
2. Did that inuence your future cheers?
8. Has anyone from the team contacted you outside the Loft?
1. How did that feel?
2. Did that inuence your future cheers?
9. Did you cheer for any other teams? Why or why not?
10. What is incomplete from this cheering experience?
1. How would you like to cheer?
2. What information would you like to have about the team?
3. What relationship would you like to have with the team?
APPENDIX C
Codebook Manual for CheerOn
Coding Instructions:
1. Read: Please read the Social Support Denition and Codebook Chart for CheerOn (below).
2. Code: Please code the 60 data points (social support comments) in the rst tab based on
this coding denition and put a 1 in the social support type that best ts the comment in
your opinion.
Social Support Denition: Social support has long been a study of researchers in HCI, psychol-
ogy, and sociology and consequently, many denitions for the construct exist (Heaney and Israel
2008). HCI researchers have studied social support as online behaviors that express empathy, un-
derstanding, provide assistance, show compassion (Barak et al. 2008; McKenna and Bargh 1998;
Tanis, 2007; Van Hooft et al. 2013), or lightweight armation shown in forms of a “like”, a rearm-
ing comment, or a network connection (Burke et al. 2009; Scissors et al. 2016). Psychologists have
studied social support as helpful actions that signal respect, encouragement, emotional support,
or armation that conrm of one’s competence (Deelstra et al. 2003, Bandura 1997, Amabile et
al. 1986). Sociologists have studied social support as:(1) emotional support, that provides empathy,
trust, and care; (2) instrumental support, that provides tangible aid and services to assist; (3) infor-
mational support, that provides advice, suggestions, and problem solving, or (4) appraisal support,
that provides armation on the appropriateness of acts or statements made by another (House
1981). For this article, we follow House’s denition of social support as it most closely resembled
the nature of the social support we observed in our specic context. Specically, the denition
allowed us to dierentiate appraisal support praising certain actions or statements made, from
emotional support, as well as instrumental support that provides tangible assistance from infor-
mational support that oers verbal support. These distinctions allow us to more closely examine
the dierent mechanisms for providing social support online.
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32:40 E. Harburg et al.
CheerOn Codebook Chart:
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CheerOn: Facilitating Online Social Support for Novice Project-Based Learning Teams 32:41
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We thank Claire McCloskey, Elizabeth Chou, and Alicia Kranjc for their tremendous help on the
data collection for this research project. In addition, we thank Design For America sta and stu-
dents who allowed us to collect this data and allowed us to interview them throughout the process.
We additionally thank the Delta Lab students and faculty who helped provide critique and support
throughout this project.
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... Understanding how socio-technical systems (STSs) can scale support and mentoring in various domains has become an emerging key goal [7,19,33,43,84]. For example, researchers have described how creative designers and artists seek inspiration and feedback through online creative communities [7,19,48]; how students are mentored by external experts and involved in real-world industry projects [9,27,61,68]; and how online forums, such as Q&A platforms, afford on-demand support and discussion [1,11,23]. Campbell and et al. [7,19] named this STS-enabled process as distributed support and mentoring. ...
... Campbell and et al. [7,19] named this STS-enabled process as distributed support and mentoring. However, literature has focused predominantly on communities where members share personal passions [7,19], or within professional communities such as creative design [47,80], apprenticeship [31,33], writing [34] or project-based learning in general (e.g., capstone projects, open source-based software engineering student projects [27,61,68,75]). ...
... Community members solve similar problems and get support from each other through processes like apprenticeship or mentoring. Members can get support through interactions with each other in the communities, such as getting advice, feedback, answering questions [7,22,27,49,56,63]. In general, social networking features increase the degree of social transparency within online communities and thus let people learn through observing and imitating examples of others' work [48]. ...
... Researchers have proven the verbal and nonverbal emotional support based on technology effective not only for asynchronous teaching and learning but also for synchronous teaching and learning in a virtual environment. For the asynchronous environment, Harburg et al. (2018) showed that the emotional support provided by the cheer-on system enhanced psychological safety, perceived value, and community building within the platform, contributing to a supportive and motivating environment for student teams. In a similar study, Iulamanova et al. (2021) found that the emotional state of the students who used the decision support system was significantly improved compared to those who did not use it. ...
... This indicates that the application of educational technology has gained importance in online teaching and learning (Scheeper & Van den Berg, 2022). However, these technology-based emotional supports mostly apply to asynchronous teaching and learning (Guo et al., 2015;Harburg et al., 2018;Iulamanova et al., 2021;Wei, 2023), and there is almost no technology-based emotional support for synchronous teaching and learning. As we all know, there are many differences between synchronous and asynchronous instruction (Bates, 2023). ...
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The provision of appropriate emotional support is influential in establishing a positive and stimulating online learning environment that can elevate students’ emotional well-being, improve their learning experience and enjoyment, and increase their academic achievements. In the present study we examine 16 papers on emotional support in online teaching and learning environments. We aim to understand (a) the emotional support given to online learners and (b) the effectiveness of emotional support in online teaching and learning environments. The review shows that the emotional support given to online learners includes empathy, understanding, motivation, and encouragement. These verbal and nonverbal emotional supports are mainly from teachers, family members, and peers as well as some online agents or applications. Most of the emotional supports influence online learners’ performance and have a favorable impact on their emotional states. The systematic review shows that there has been little research on technology-based emotional support and synchronous teaching and learning environments. We propose that more research should be carried out in these areas.
... Students' receiving social support has no correlation with perceived social support, and the result was consistent with prior studies in the social sciences field (Eagle et al., 2019;Lakey et al., 2010). The reason may be that received social support coming from people who are not close, and may even be strangers, was not meaningful to students because they felt that those people neither understood their work fully nor cared about them personally (Harburg et al., 2018). In this regard, students' perception of received online support may mainly come from teachers' and a few students' support. ...
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Students always suffer from burnout during online learning. Although social support and cognitive engagement are associated with learning burnout, limited information is available on whether and how these relationships change over time in an online learning setting. This study investigated the longitudinal relationships between social support, cognitive engagement, and learning burnout and the further relations associated with performance. Forum data and self-reported data from 116 online college students were analyzed at two different timepoints. We found received social support is not related to learning burnout but shows a positive relationship with cognitive engagement that increases over time. Perceived social support is always positively correlated with cognitive engagement and negatively associated with learning burnout. Cognitive engagement has a negative relation with learning burnout that increases over time. Moreover, the negative relationship between learning burnout and performance emerges in the middle of the term but not at the end, thus indicating a significant change over time. The findings have significant ramifications for both preventing and intervening in online learning burnout.
... As interest in computer-assisted learning increased after the 2000s, the systems that utilize game elements and communities have been introduced steadily, and the implementation of social characteristics in learning environments has started to be regarded as important [10][11][12]. In addition, as open learning systems such as MOOC attract attention, thus increasing interest in the cognition and utilization of social elements, social presence is emerging again [13][14][15][16]. In the existing studies, social presence is understood to have a big effect on learning satisfaction, learning attitude, and student view activities [16,17]. ...
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As interest in online learning has increased, studies utilizing a social system for the innovation of lecture/learning environments have attracted attention recently. To establish a sustainable social environment in the online learning system, prior research investigated strategies to improve and manage the social presence of collaborators (e.g., students, AI facilitators, etc.) in an online lecture. Nevertheless, the negative effect of social presence was often neglected, which leads to a lack of comprehensiveness in managing social presence in an online lecturing environment. In the study, we intend to investigate the influence of social presence with both positive (student engagement) and negative (information overload) aspects on the learning experience by formulating a structural equation model. To test the model, we implemented an experimental online lecture system for the introductory session of human–computer interaction, and data from 83 participants were collected. The model was analyzed with Partial Least Square Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM). The result shows the social presence of the collaborators influences both student engagement (other learners: β = 0.239, t = 2.187) and information overload (agent facilitator: β = 0.492, t = 6.163; other learners: β = 0.168, t = 1.672). The result also supports that student engagement is influenced by information overload as well (β = −0.490, t = 3.712). These positive and negative factors of social presence influence learning attainment (student engagement: β = 0.183, t = 1.680), satisfaction (student engagement: β = 0.385, t = 3.649; information overload: β = −0.292, t = 2.343), and learning efficacy (student engagement: β = 0.424, t = 2.543). Thus, it corroborates that a change in the level of social presence influences student engagement and information overload; furthermore, it confirms that the effect of changes in social presence is reflected differently depending on learning attainment and experience.
... Second, the teacher observed that only a few groups proactively asked questions to her in private while most students did not look for help for the group activity. This infrequent engagement in help-seeking among novice PjBL students was also found by Harburg et al. (2018). ...
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... Second, the teacher observed that only a few groups proactively asked questions to her in private while most students did not look for help for the group activity. This infrequent engagement in help-seeking among novice PjBL students was also found by Harburg et al. (2018). ...
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... Second, the teacher observed that only a few groups proactively asked questions to her in private while most students did not look for help for the group activity. This infrequent engagement in help-seeking among novice PjBL students was also found by Harburg et al. (2018). ...
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The role of teachers is an important element of online project-based learning courses. Based on the Community of Inquiry framework, this study examined how students' perceptions of teaching presence, through social presence and cognitive presence, were related to their evaluations of online project-based learning. A 16-week online project-based legal education course was implemented. During the course, students engaged in two small group activities and created two final products. Survey data were collected twice from 38 and 41 students in two course phases. Results from partial least squares analyses revealed that teaching presence was directly related to students' evaluations in the early stage of the course and indirectly related to students' evaluations, through the effects of social presence, in the entire course. Practical implications for teachers and suggestions for further studies are provided.
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Culturally responsive STEM and computing initiatives aim to engage and embolden a diverse range of learners, center their identity and experiences in curriculum, and connect learners to each other and their communities. With an abrupt pivot to online learning at the beginning of 2020, more educational experiences have taken place virtually. We ran a virtual synchronous culturally responsive computing camp and saw that establishing the right environment online to support a good sense of connectedness was challenging. To investigate this further, we interviewed eight K-12 instructors of culturally responsive STEM and computing programs. Three themes emerged on defining and cultivating connectedness in learning experiences, the role of equity in supporting community online, and affordances of being online specific to culturally responsive perspectives. We support our thematic findings with vignettes from the camp data. In this study, we address K-12 culturally responsive STEM and computing instructors' beliefs, experiences, and approaches regarding cultivating connectedness online. This work fills a gap in understanding instructor perspectives on building in-program and broader community connections online from a culturally responsive STEM and computing lens.
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Since the first descriptions of design research (DR), there have been calls to better define it to increase its rigour. Yet five uncertainties remain: (1) the processes for conducting DR, (2) how DR differs from other forms of research, (3) how DR differs from design, (4) the products of DR, and (5) why DR can answer certain research questions more effectively than other methodologies. To resolve these uncertainties, we define educational design research as a meta-methodology conducted by education researchers to create practical interventions and theoretical design models through a design process of focusing, understanding, defining, conceiving, building, testing, and presenting, that recursively nests other research processes to iteratively search for empirical solutions to practical problems of human learning. By better articulating the logic of DR, researchers can more effectively craft, communicate, replicate, and teach DR as a useful and defensible research methodology.
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To provide the substantial support required for project-based learning (PBL), educators can incorporate professional experts as design coaches. However, previous work shows barriers incorporating design coaches who can rarely meet face-to-face: (a) communication online is time-consuming, (b) updating coaches online is not perceived as valuable, (c) students do not seek help, (d) coaches are not proactive online, and (e) coaches struggle to gain the awareness from student online communications. How might we design socio-technical systems that can incorporate professionals coaching? In a 6-week university PBL product design program with 3 teams (4 members per team) and 5 coaches, teams met with coaches on campus for 2-hours a week, but otherwise communicated with teams online. We created and tested StandUp, a system designed to overcome coaching barriers online that: prompts team planning, goal setting, and monitoring of progress, and displays this information online to coaches. We collected and analyzed interview, observation, and log data. We found StandUp helped participants overcome coaching barriers by providing students a way to regulate group learning which in turn automatically emailed reports to coaches thereby supporting coach awareness; coach awareness in turn prompted both online coaching and face-to-face coaching. This work provides evidence from one context. Future work should measure learning and explore different regulation scripts.