• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
• /
• v.12 no.5
• /
• pp.541-552
• /
• 2012

The purpose of the study was to investigate the effects of On-Line Community Assisted Team Learning (OCATL) activities on academic achievement and team member's Shared Mental Model(SMM) subscale scores. Two studies were conducted over two semesters in different universities. The first study was aimed at examining the effects of OCATL on university students' academic achievement using pre- and post- experimental design. For this experiment, 133 university students composed of 80 male and 53 female students from 13 colleges participated. The OCATL activities included the orientation of OCATL, seminar on collaborative learning, on-line community assisted team learning with sixteen hour participation during one semester and a final report (or a term paper). To measure these students' academic achievement, their pre- and post-semester's GPA were compared. The results of paired t-test revealed a significant difference in academic achievement (p<.05). The second study was designed to compare the scores of SMM subscales of the experimental group with the OCATL activities and those of the control group without using OCATL activities. The data was collected using the scale of Shared Mental Model(SMM)-short version developed by Johnson in 2011[18]. For this study, 74 participants from 10 teams served as an experimental group and 15 teams which were not exposed to OCATL activities served as a control group. The MANOVA results showed that SMM subscores of two groups measured after the experiment were statistically significantly different: The experimental group with the OCATL activities showed high scores on general task and team knowledge, general task and communication skills, attitudes toward team and task, team dynamics and interactions, team resources and working environment, and satisfaction with the team.