Mediator-learner Dyad

Cooperative Relationships

Gilda Helena Bernardino de Campos

1,2

and Gianna Oliveira Bogossian Roque

Dept. Education and Central Coordination for Distance learning, Pontificia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro,

Rio de Janeiro, 22453900, Brazil

Central Coordination for Distance learning, Pontificia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro,

Rio de Janeiro, 22453900, Brazil

Keywords: Pedagogic Mediation, Distance Learning, Teacher Performance, Alceste.

Abstract: This study presents results from a quali-quantitative research looking for evidence on the pedagogical

mediation influence on the academic performance of distance learning students. For the systematization of

the responses to the research question, a content analysis was performed using the Alceste method. An

explanation for the evidence of the mediation relevance to the student professional performance, following

from the dyad for cooperation concept, based on social psychology theoretical underpinnings, founded on

the philosophy of the Hegelian logic. These concepts paved the ground on which the analysis was deployed.

1 INTRODUCTION

The accelerated increase in the number of

undergraduate and post-graduate courses delivered

through the distance education model in Brazil in

recent years makes it necessary to rethink the

indicators used in the quality assessment of distance

learning courses.

This article presents the results of a research on

the actions of pedagogical mediators. We assumed

that the relationship established between mediator

and student forms a dyad that establishes a situation

of cooperation throughout the course, as defined by

Morton Deutsch (1973). This means that there is

only one goal for these participants connected in

such a way that the final goal can only be reached if,

and only if, both are able to reach their goals.

Deutsch coined the term promotive interdependence

which has been used to characterize the relationships

and connections in which there is a positive

correlation between achievement and success of

both participants (p. 20). From a philosophical

viewpoint, we believe that this positive correlation,

as well as its counterpart, the negative correlation of

competition, taken as opposites, can be expressed in

the contradiction of Hegelian dialectic (Hegel,

1812).

2 THE FIELD OF RESEARCH

The central objective of the present research was to

investigate the way students signified what is quality

in distance learning courses. To this end, we

developed a questionnaire consisting of 25 objective

questions and four open-ended questions – made

available online and protecting the identity of

respondents. This instrument was sent to all 3,828

students finishing the specialisation course

Tecnologias am Educação [Technologies in

Education], resulting in 2,117 answers.

The specialisation course Tecnologias em

Educação targeted teachers and managers selected

by the State Departments of Education (SEE) and

Municipal Departments of Education (SME)

covering the entire Brazilian territory in different

regions.

The structure of monitoring and support of the

course participants involved teachers-authors,

pedagogical mediators, educators on different nuclei

of educational technology in the country,

coordinators, technical support, secretariat, among

others. In order to academically monitor course

participants, distributed in 208 classes, a team of 110

pedagogical mediators was formed, and each was

responsible for one or two classes of a maximum of

30 students. It is worth noting that the course was

distance-learning, and the pedagogical mediator was

317

Helena Bernardino de Campos G. and Oliveira Bogossian Roque G..

Mediator-learner Dyad - Cooperative Relationships.

DOI: 10.5220/0004961503170322

In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU-2014), pages 317-322

ISBN: 978-989-758-021-5

 2014 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

responsible for the enhancement of the learning

space, individualised attention to students, guidance

with regard to the content covered in the disciplines

by establishing a dialogue between students and the

study materials and learning assessment.

The objective questions of the questionnaire

sought evidence on the following topics: teaching

material; study guidance; student support; technical

support; study environment, and self-assessment.

For writing this article we selected part of the study

which deals with one of the open-ended questions on

pedagogical mediation: How did the Pedagogical

Mediation carried out throughout the course

contribute to your academic performance? The

procedure we chose for data analysis was discourse

analysis.

3 PROCEDURES FOR DATA

ANALYSIS

In this research, we chose to work with content

analysis through the ALCESTE software: Analyse

des Lexèmes Coocurrents dans un Ensemble de

Segments de Texte (Reinert, 2007, p. 35). Either in

the analysis of co-occurring lexemes in a set of text

segments or in simple statements in a text, “the

method's principle is simple,” writes Reinert (2007):

“The corpus to be analysed is cut into a series of text

segments and the distribution of full words in these

segments is observed: hence the name of the

method” (p. 35). The “full word,” assumed as

something meaningful, is different from the “tool

word” (“mot outil”) like, for example, the

conjunction or pronoun that acts as an aid

supporting language in discourse.

Its functionality consists in successive analyses

that seek to distribute the co-occurrence of the full

word in different text segments or in its simple

statements, taken two by two. Within the theoretical

framework which conceived and operationalised the

Alceste method, we find the fundamental

assumptions of psychoanalytic theory on the

concepts of free association and repetition, from

which the method has been gradually implemented.

The conception of the ALCESTE method leads

Reinert to Lacan and demarcates precisely what one

should expect from key-algorithms that intend to

seek significant structures, that is, configurations

signalling meaning:

Studying the meaning of an utterance, of a discourse,

presupposes that one takes into account a specificity of

meaning. It is trinitarian: meaning as sensation,

meaning as direction, and meaning as significance.

The meaning of an utterance develops dynamically

due to a reading like a braid with three strands […] the

analysis of certain corpus allows us to undo the knots

of the braid (REINERT, 2000, p. 1).

Reinert did this in order to bring these concepts

to the data table to be prioritised, without any kind

of a priori criteria, through correspondence analysis.

In practical terms, the Alceste software seeks a

pragmatic approach to the text, focused on lexical

co-occurrence, co-presence of vocabulary contrasted

to two contextual units of the corpus. According to

Lima (2008), it is not about comparing the statistical

distribution of ‘words’ in different data corpora, it

consists in studying the formal structure of their co-

occurrences in the ‘statements’ of a given corpus.

What the Alceste programme examines in the text

are not the superficial divisions resulting from the

meanings of individual words, but, as Lima (2008,

p. 89) points out, “it examines the resonances of

meanings established due to the co-occurrences of

some terms, and which appear clumped together in

certain parts of the text (discourse) at certain points.”

Later, we may observe the analysis stages or

procedures of the software.

To enable the organisation of the analysis

procedures we first needed to delimit the

categorisation of the text to be analysed, the

occurrence of which is registered according to the

categories raised and the contextual units – the

broadest part of the content to be analysed. We used

as variables some characteristics we regarded as

significant to the analysis of the questions, in this

case: the number of the individual, their gender, the

class to which they belong, and their school system.

4 DESCRIPTION OF

QUALITATIVE DATA

We identified 2,079 units of initial context (UIC),

that originated, from the analytical approach of the

Alceste software, 2,049 units of elementary context

(UEC). Of those, 85% were classified, resulting in

the hierarchisation of four classes.

From the data matrices, the program performs a

descending hierarchical classification (DHC), which

produces a hierarchical tree, the dendogram of

Figure 1, which reveals the identification of the

classes through the DHC, where we can identify two

groups. The first, formed by Class 3, and the second

formed by classes 2, 4, and 1. Camargo (2005)

explains that the descending hierarchical

classification only ends when the classes become

stable.

In the specific context of the linguistic

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Figure 1: Descending Hierarchical Dendogram.

intersection with psychoanalytic theory (Reinert,

2001) there is an observation we consider important

in the assessment of the stabilisation of the process

of hierarchical descent created by Reinert for the

Alceste methodology, technically enabled by

Benzécri's (1992) correspondence analysis.

We note that Class 3 is the class with the highest

number of occurrences, therefore, it is not the

biggest in size. Class 2, in spite of having the highest

number of occurrences, is the second in hierarchy

and contrasts with Class 3. This contrast contains the

central point of this article, which consists in the

dyad between mediator and student.

The goal of the descending hierarchical

classification is to make explicit “among all possible

partitions in two classes the one which can be

considered the most significant statistically”

(Marchand, 2007, p. 63). It is an iterative procedure

– the first class analysed comprises all context units

retained, and the procedure seeks the partition in two

classes which makes the chi-squared of the table

margins reach their maximum. The most

“important” and significant class comes from there.

The same procedure is carried out with what

remained outside this class and which will again

produce two classes, one of which will be retained,

the rest reprocessed in new iterations, until the

procedure is exhausted and stops.

Within this technical framework, let us comment

on some of the main results. Class 2 is subdivided

into two classes, forming a perfect hierarchy. It is a

“bipolar hierarchy,” to use the terminology used by

Kalampalikis (2003) for this descending sequence

configuration. This hierarchy points towards the

existence of the contradiction, in the dialectical

sense proposed by Hegel, between two opposed

individuals who have a cooperative position but who

belong to a different locus from one another and

pursue the same goal. In this point Deutsch's (1973)

theory of cooperation and competition comes in,

based on the contradiction of opposites in a situation

of interdependence, operationalised in the same two-

by-two matrix we have been using. In the

cooperative situation, the correlation is positive in

the intertwining of the goals achieved by

participants. In the competitive situation, in turn, the

correlation is negative, because the intertwining of

goals achieved is based on contradiction. The

application of these concepts of

cooperation/competition in the educational context,

within the framework of the theory of social

interdependence, is exemplified by the great impact

of the work, in Educational Researcher, by Johnson

(2012).

The divisions between classes represent the

relation of proximity of pre-existing meanings

common to them. Considering the reduced words

and/or forms, it is possible to name the formation of

classes in the following way:

 Class 3 – pedagogical training of mediator;

 Class 4 – Mediator as the main motivator of the

student;

 Class 1 – Pedagogical strategies of mediation;

 Class 2 – Mediator as a “knowledgebase.”

4.1 Analysis of Class 3 – Pedagogic

Training and Mediation

Class 3 deals with essential aspects to the training of

the pedagogical mediator from the viewpoint of

students in the professional training of the

participating teachers. In this way, we managed to

identify two distinct axes in one single class. The

first axis includes the words slogans learn+,

resource+, teach+, educ+, media+, use+, class+, and

room+ [aprendi+, recurso+, ensin+, educ+, midia+,

uso+, aula+, and sala+] as those related to the

pedagogical mediator's theoretical and practical

knowledge. The second axis, in turn, includes the

radicals professional+, enrich+, knowledg+, ampli+,

reflect+, practic+, and innovat+ [profissional+,

enriquec+, conheci+, ampli+, reflet+, pratic+, and

inovador+], that are revealing of the result or

Mediator-learnerDyad-CooperativeRelationships

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influence that pedagogical mediation had in the

professional performance of the student.

In this class, two aspects are highlighted:

Educational background of pedagogical mediator

and Influences of mediation on the professional

practice/training of the student. In the students's

conception, the pedagogical mediator, in their

training, must have knowledge on the learning

processes, didactic in distance education, and

theoretical and practical knowledge on the subject

they teach. The knowledge of the pedagogical

mediator in relation to learning processes are

intimately connected to the pedagogical and

communicational conception on which the course is

based. Within the skills that involve learning

processes, the students raised questions about the

commitment the mediator should have to student

learning.

Pedagogical mediation is the basis of the process of

teaching and learning and in a distance learning

course, and essential for the permanence of the student

and construction of knowledge (Ind_344 *Gen_F

*Turma_BA05)

With respect to didactic in distance education,

the students presented two aspects in their

statements,: the first, that the mediator needs to

know distance education how to use the interfaces

present in the virtual environment, and teach

students how to work with the environment's

interface, and enable student-mediator interaction in

the virtual environment. Another aspect to be

highlighted is the fact that many students had their

first contact with distance education and did not feel

confident in the navigation. It was up to the

pedagogical mediator to identify these students and

offer them support.

(…) it was very important, because I managed to learn

how to interact and handle the several tools and new

technological advances, besides entering the era of

digital inclusion, because I was ignorant on the subject

(*Ind_1092 *Gen_M *Turma_PB01).

Here we emphasize the importance of a mediator

who is a researcher, in the sense of always seeking

new media and new uses to share with students, as

well as encouraging them to develop an autonomous

way of learning, carrying out their own researches

according to their school routine.

The influence of mediation on the practical and

professional education portrayed by the students was

understood as reflection and performance in

classroom. The recognition of reflection as

something meaningful in the professional

performance of participants can be perceived in the

following statements:

Pedagogical mediation was precise, providing content

that brought reflection on the pedagogical

performance of each student in their working

environment, reevaluating practice (*Ind_1590

*Gen_F *Turma_RO03).

From the student's statements we can observe

that the influence of reflection was not attributed

only to the pedagogical mediator, but also as a result

of the whole course, being seen as a skill that was

developed be means of learning, collaboration, and

knowledge built during the specialization.

It is through the act of reflection that the teacher

feels the need to change their pedagogical practice

or, as was brought up by the students, their

performance in the classroom. It is not enough for

the teacher to only know how to work with

technologies, manipulate them, or include them in

the school routine and in the class plan if this

process is not accompanied by reflection. Their

performance in the classroom will not significantly

change.

Pedagogical mediation provided some didactic

innovations that facilitated my teaching practice.

(*Ind_1957 *Gen_F *Turma_SP04)

4.2 Analysis of Class 2 – Motivation

Strategies

Class 2 is hierarchically superior to Classes 1 and 4

and contains 44% of the analysed UECs. We

identified in this class UECs related to the mediator

as someone who motivates the student during the

course and about the assessment strategies used by

the mediator. We also found statements from

students who attributed to the mediator their having

been able to complete the course.

We note a division between two larger groups,

with the first one also divided (Classes 1 and 4). The

meanings present in the first group (Class 2) are: the

importance of the mediator in the conclusion of the

course, based on the radicals mediator+, essent+,

importance+ [mediador+, fundament+,

importancia+]; and the characteristics or attributions

of the mediator in order for them to motivate the

student, which we identified through the radicals

competent+, sympathetic+, drop+, congratulations+

[ competent+, compreensiva+, desist+, parabéns+];

and support from the mediator for the student to

conclude the specialisation, present in the words

slogans drop+, support+ conclu+ initi+ [desist+,

apoi+ conclu+ inici+]. In the second group (Classes

1 and 4), in turn, it became clear the meaning of the

importance of monitoring the performance of the

student by the mediator throughout the course and

the strategies used in this, considered through the

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analysis of the words slogans curs+, get+, not+ and

long+ [curs+, cheg+, not+ e longo+] in their

elementary context units. It is clear that the elements

of student motivation are their affective relationship

with the mediator, assessment, and conclusion of the

course.

(…) my mediator was great. She was always attentive

to everything and very supportive, even emotionally

when difficulties arose. (*Ind_479 *Gen_F

*Turma_DF02).

Monitoring and assessment of distance learning

courses is a great challenge, especially when what is

at stake is quality of education. The course adopted a

process of training evaluation, therefore, it was

necessary to set up a monitoring structure, in which

the students were evaluated by the pedagogical

mediator throughout their process learning, carried

out a self-evaluation of their performance in the

course and, finally, participated in institutional

evaluations. According to Roque (2011), the

evaluation and monitoring of distance-education

students requires special considerations, since

distance learning, when guided by pedagogical

assumptions, aims at developing the critical

autonomy of the students. Besides, distance

education does not include the physical presence of

the teacher, which makes necessary the development

of work methods that promote student trust, enabling

the elaboration of their own judgments and their

ability to analyse them.

It is clear, from the statements of the students,

that there is a connection between mediation and

good performance in the course, even as a way to

enable its conclusion. A relationship of motivation

and affectivity through the encouragements and

support in the realisation of activities also became

evident. The item ‘course conclusion’ highlighted

the importance of the pedagogical mediator in the

completion of the course of each student. In their

oral statements, the participants managed to show

how the mediator motivated them in order for them

to achieve their goals and reach the end of the

specialisation.

The pedagogical mediation carried out during the

course contributed to my academic performance in all

possible ways. It was extremely important for my

following the course, with encouragement and

support. (*Ind_780 *Gen_F *Turma_MG01).

The student's depictions revealed the importance

of the cooperation dyad involving affectivity and

monitoring.

The subdivisions of Class 2 were named

Pedagogical Strategies (Class 1) and Knowledgebase

Mediator (Class 4). They do not represent in

themselves the explicit contradiction between their

hierarchically superior class. The Class 2 set, in

contradiction with Class 3, explains the importance

of the mediator-learner dyad.

5 CONCLUSIONS

The testimonials of the students, who are teachers in

the public school system, reveal the unfoldings of

reflection in their professional practice. Pedagogical

mediation, by encouraging the students to reflect,

also promotes the transformation of their classroom

performance, their education, and professional

development. Pedagogical mediation was perceived

by the students in the support they received during

the realisation of activities and interaction in the

proposed forums. Interestingly, the answers showed

no reference to necessary physical presence of the

mediator. Throughout the development of the course,

pedagogical mediation appears as a permanent and

individualised activity, whose objective is

monitoring the students and offering each of them

the help necessary in the learning process. Despite

the fact that the central issue of this work has

focused on evidences of the contribution of

pedagogical mediation in the academic performance

of students, looking into themselves, the actions

were viewed as important to the improvement of

professional performance – the main goal of the

course – besides being highlighted as the reason for

students to conclude the course.

Resuming the pragmatist perspective pointed out

by Reinert, the object of analysis cannot be

separated from its context. We emphasize, then, that

the situation of the pedagogical mediator and the

student is not static. The relationship of cooperation

between them is dynamic, since it is alive and

maintains direct and individual communication with

each student. The three definitions of the word

‘meaning,’ namely, sensation or intuition, direction

or motion, and significance, were demonstrated in

this paper based on the mediator-learner dyad in the

context of cooperation throughout the course,

towards professional qualification and, finally, in the

meaning of change that can be verified in the

comments from the students.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors would like to thank Cilio Ziviani for his

collaboration in sharing his expertise on Alceste.

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