Epistemic Network Analysis for End-users: Closing the Loop in the Context of Multimodal Analytics for Collaborative Team Learning

Effective collaboration and team communication are critical across many sectors. However, the complex dynamics of collaboration in physical learning spaces, with overlapping dialogue segments and varying participant interactions, pose assessment challenges for educators and self-reflection difficulties for students. Epistemic network analysis (ENA) is a relatively novel technique that has been used in learning analytics (LA) to unpack salient aspects of group communication. Yet, most LA works based on ENA have primarily sought to advance research knowledge rather than directly aid teachers and students by closing the LA loop. We address this gap by conducting a study in which we i) engaged teachers in designing human-centred versions of epistemic networks; ii) formulated an NLP methodology to code physically distributed dialogue segments of students based on multimodal (audio and positioning) data, enabling automatic generation of epistemic networks; and iii) deployed the automatically generated epistemic networks in 28 authentic learning sessions and investigated how they can support teaching. The results indicate the viability of completing the analytics loop through the design of streamlined epistemic network representations that enable teachers to support students’ reflections.