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Understanding how students perceive the role of ideas for their knowledge work in a knowledge-building environment
Huang-Yao Hong and Chieh-Hsin Chiu
National Chengchi University, Taiwan
This study explored how students viewed the role of ideas for knowledge work and how such view was related to their inquiry activities. Data mainly came from students’ online interaction logs, group discussion and inquiry, and a survey concerning the role of ideas for knowledge work. The findings suggest that knowledge building was conducive to developing among students a more informed view of ideas that sees ideas as improvable, real-world objects for collaborative and creative knowledge work, rather than merely as abstract thoughts for achieving an individual’s own knowledge acquisition. Moreover, it was found that how a group views the role of ideas was associated with how they improve the quality of the ideas during their group inquiry.
Introduction
As argued by Reigeluth (2013), the educational paradigm before the 21st century was based on an
industrial model in which standardisation and the mass production of manufacturing is highly valued.
Under this paradigm, educational practice tends to highlight efficiency of individual knowledge
acquisition and accumulation by teaching learners the same content and skills that are predetermined by strict curriculum guidelines under a precise time frame (e.g., see Adams & Engelmann, 1996; Magliaro, Lockee, & Burton, 2005). Within such instructional practices, students are seldom given opportunities and autonomy to engage in self-directed inquiry that requires them to produce and continuously improve their ideas for knowledge work. However, given the rise of an information-driven and knowledge-based society (UNESCO, 2005), the industrial age–based educational paradigm is gradually giving way to a new economic model that favours customisation and a personalised information service (Reigeluth, 2013). As such, conventional educational practice is also shifting to focus more on cultivating competent and creative citizens who are able to work creatively and collaboratively with ideas for solving urgent environmental and social issues in service of the public good (Florida, 2002). This is in sharp contrast to traditional teaching in which ideas are often viewed as irrelevant and disruptive thoughts that interfere with the pre-specified teaching plan and classroom routines. Students with innovative ideas in class are sometimes even treated as unruly and misbehaved learners. Unsolicited ideas are especially highly unwelcome as they forbid teachers from completing their deliberate instructional goal and their assigned responsibilities for covering more curriculum materials in less time (Papert, 2000). Papert (2000) described such a situation that is commonly observed in most traditional learning environments as “idea aversion” (i.e., dislike of ideas). Inculcated with such a deep-rooted belief, it is unlikely for students to be given any chances of producing their own ideas and working innovatively with these ideas for collective knowledge advancement. It is also impossible for students to learn to appreciate the importance of ideas for creating new knowledge and solving real-world problems. The aim of this study was to improve understanding of how to foster students’ capacity to work collaboratively and innovatively with ideas and to help them develop a more informed view of the role of ideas for their knowledge work. The two research questions concerned in this study are (1) whether engaging students in knowledge building would help them enhance their online performance by working more cohesively as groups while collaboratively achieving their groups’ knowledge work and (2) whether students who are more engaged in knowledge-building activities would also be more likely to develop a more informed view that sees ideas as essential objects for sustained knowledge work.
Literature review
Fostering a design-mode of view for sustained idea improvement. One way to help students develop a deeper understanding and appreciation of “ideas” as essential objects for knowledge creation may be to engage students in actual “knowledge-building” activities (Hargreaves, 1999; Hong & Sullivan, 2009; Scardamalia & Bereiter, 2006). Knowledge building is defined as a collaborative process focused on sustained production and improvement of ideas in a community (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 2003). As an idea-centred pedagogical approach, knowledge building draws on Popper’s (1972, 1978) three-world epistemological position of constructivism. In addition to the physical/material world (world 1) and the psychological world existing in the human mind (world 2), Popper posited a world 3 reality that is mainly constituted of ideas. These ideas are produced by knowledge workers (e.g., engineers, scientists, designers, and architects), and, once created, they are embodied within a social life like tangible, real-world objects that can be further tinkered and experimented with by other knowledge agents and become more powerful solutions to problems. Under a world 3 view, therefore, ideas should be treated as tentative knowledge claims and be continuously subjected to critical scrutiny (e.g., through examination, clarification, and falsification) for further development. Likewise, in order to develop a successful knowledge-building community, its members also need to perceive the role of ideas as world 3 improvable objects for collective knowledge advancement (Scardamalia, 2002), rather than merely treating them as world 2 psychological constructs for achieving personal knowledge gain. Unfortunately, as cogently argued by Bereiter (1994), conventional classroom teaching tends to focus on instilling in students’ minds a prescribed body of
knowledge from a world 2 perspective, while neglecting the importance of cultivating students’
competencies to work with ideas in world 3.
To address this concern, it is important to distinguish two different modes of knowledge work: belief
mode and design mode (Bereiter, 2002; Bereiter & Scardamalia, 2003). To elaborate, the belief mode
emphasises the ability to evaluate ideas and/or knowledge claims using well-established and accepted true beliefs. Students’ intellectual life and classroom work in schools is conventionally dominated by such a mode of thinking. When students’ minds are functioning in a belief mode, they are often guided to ponder questions such as: Is this idea true or reasonable? What are the assumptions on which this idea is based? In contrast, the design mode of thinking highlights the ability to go beyond the pursuit of truth by engaging in sustained idea generation and improvement for knowledge advancement. When students are committed to a design mode of knowledge work, they tend to ask questions such as: What is the value of this idea? What is it good for? What can it or can it not do? How can it be further improved? While both modes are needed for knowledge work, a main epistemological difference between the two modes of view is that the belief mode tends to highlight knowledge acquisition and accumulation by viewing ideas as knowledge claims to be verified; whereas the design mode intends to facilitate innovative knowledge work by viewing ideas as improvable objects for knowledge advances (Cross, 2007).
One important thing to note is that engaging in a design-mode of knowledge work is, in essence, a
metacognitive process, as one has to constantly reflect and plan ahead in order to continually advance
ideas. Particularly from the perspective of knowledge building as a social process, the kind of metacognitive behaviours required for design-mode activities must be collectively (rather than
individually) attained. How a knowledge-building group sees the role of ideas and accordingly exercises its self-regulatory efforts can greatly influence the effectiveness of their knowledge advancement activities (Hong & Sullivan, 2009). Previous studies have also shown that productive collaborative knowledge work is greatly related to a group’s regulation activities (e.g., Dehler, Bodemer, Buder, & Hesse, 2011; Goos, Galbraith, & Renshaw, 2002).
Fostering the process of idea improvement
Hong and Sullivan (2009) proposed an idea-centred instructional framework to illustrate the
collaborative, emergent, and self-regulated process of sustained idea improvement in a typical
knowledge-building environment. This framework illustrates “idea generation”, “idea diversification”, and “idea elaboration” as three important activities for the process of effective idea improvement. First, in terms of idea generation, most research literature has considered it as an essential phase for productive knowledge or design work (e.g., Linsey et al., 2011), and an important line of empirical research has investigated effective instructional strategies or techniques to help idea generation (Faure, 2004; Miura & Hida, 2004; Mumford, 2001; Paulus & Yang, 2000; Rietzschel, Nijstad, & Stroebe, 2014). For example, Rietzschel et al.’s (2014) study found that when students were guided to work in a more narrowed (as contrasted with more broad) problem scope or when they were required to come up with ideas that were more original (as contrasted with more relevant), they were more likely to come up with innovative ideas. Hong, Chang, and Chai’s (2011) study found that it is more likely to foster idea generation when students are allowed to work on problems of their own interest and when the learning climate in an environment is perceived by learners as more open and creative. Second, from a socio-epistemological perspective (Fuller, 1988), idea diversification can be achieved by means of exchanging ideas or perspectives among members with distributed expertise. Previous research has suggested that idea exchange is critical to the process of knowledge advancement (Gong, Kim, Zhu, & Lee, 2013; Hong, Scardamalia, & Zhang, 2010; Perttula, Krause, & Sipilä, 2006). For example, Perttula et al.’s (2006) design experiment found that individuals who exchanged ideas were more likely to generate more ideas. Kohn, Paulus, and Choi (2011) conducted two experiments to explore the knowledge sharing process during which ideas are exchanged and/or combined in students’ brainstorming activities. They found that group endeavour was more effective than individual effort in generating more novel and viable idea combinations.
Thirdly, from the perspective of evolutionary epistemology (Popper, 1978), ideas can be refined by
community members acting as knowledge workers reflecting collaboratively on the potentials and
limitations of the ideas at issue. Previous studies have investigated ways of collaboration to help further elaborate ideas (e.g., Chen, Chuy, Resendes, Scardamalia, & Bereiter, 2011; Kipp, Bittner, Bretschneider, & Marco, 2014) and ways of idea elaboration that may enhance or hinder creative knowledge work (e.g., Kudrowitz & Wallace, 2013; Stark & Perfect, 2008; Verhaegen, Vandevenne, Peeters, & Duflou, 2013). For example, Kudrowitz and Wallace’s (2013) study found that the systematic use of a metric integrating three attributes (i.e., novelty, usefulness, and feasibility) as an elaboration means can be helpful in identifying more innovative ideas.
In a productive idea improvement process, once the initial ideas are generated, they need to be reified
(e.g., presented as a note or a message and contributed to an online database). Doing so helps transform these initial ideas from an individual’s mental constructs to become public property recorded permanently (e.g., in an online database). This is important as ideas conceived only in one’s mind (as world 2) cannot be treated as tangible objects for collective improvement. Further, the extent of idea diversification and exchange is a function of how ideas beget more ideas and interact with and relate to one another; and idea reflection or elaboration is a function of how collaborative knowledge workers try to increase the value of ideas and deepen their collective understanding of what the ideas can or cannot do to address the problem they are dealing with. In an optimal situation, idea improvement relies on an emerging process of idea generation, with idea diversification and idea elaboration serving as two essential social mechanisms closely intertwined to enable the transformation of initial ideas into more innovative ones (Chen, Scardamalia, Acosta, Resendes, & Kici, 2013).
Assessing ideas as outcomes of idea improvement
Along with an emerging knowledge-building process, ideas are expected to be transformed into tentative learning outcomes, including (1) initial ideas that are generated and contributed individually to a community’s database, (2) diversified ideas that are made possible through sharing/exchanging of or relating to the initial ideas, to (3) elaborated ideas that are further refined or modified continually by means of collaborative reflection among community members, and (4) more promising and valuable ideas that are made possible from opportunistically integrating diversified and elaborated ideas into more feasible solutions or coherent accounts for addressing a problem. When ideas as outcomes transformed from an emergent improvement process are to be treated as real-world material objects, it is likely for a knowledge-building group or class to form a complex collection of ideas (recorded in a database) that emulates a knowledge community or what Popper (1978) called world 3 reality
Results
Overall analysis of online performance
Pre-post comparisons were made between the early and later knowledge-building phases (using midterm as a separation point) for online activities (see Table 3). The rationale of using the two phases for analysis is because these two phases corresponded to the two main idea improvement activities, with the early knowledge-building phase highlighting more divergent idea-diversification activity and the later knowledge-building phase focusing on more convergent idea-elaboration activity. Overall, the frequency of all activities was quite consistent. There were no significant differences between the two phases in terms of all major online activities, except that there was a significant increase in the number of notes read in phase 2, which indicates increasing community awareness of group knowledge work (e.g., who was interacting or collaborating with whom in a group, and what ideas were being improved) towards the end of the course. Additionally, all the online measures were found significantly correlated with one another (all r’s > .43, p’s < .05, for all measures in phase 1; (all r’s > .31, p’s < .05, for all measures in phase 2; and all r’s > .60 p’s < .01, for all measures throughout the whole semester, e.g., see Table 4), which suggests that the more active the participants were in one type of online activity, the more likely they would be actively engaged in another type of activity.
As a main interest of this study is collaborative knowledge building, additional analysis of interaction
patterns was conducted using social network analysis. As shown in the bottom part of Table 3, overall, there was a descending trend in terms of network density from early knowledge-building to later knowledge-building phase for both note-reading and note-linking activities. Further, there was an ascending trend in terms of betweenness centrality from early to later phase (for note-reading only). To elaborate, relatively lower network density and higher betweenness centrality in the later phase implies that there were less whole community-based online activities and more focused small group-based activities. This may be because that the instructional design of this course encouraged students to progressively form groups and work within groups based on common interest in certain technology problems. Another explanation is that towards the end of the semester, within-group inquiry became more essential for completing each group’s final technological product. This is also confirmed by the fact that there were progressively more idea elaboration and intensive inquiry activities within groups (as shown by the higher-level scaffold use), rather than merely idea-sharing and shallow inquiry activities within the whole community and between groups (as shown by the lower-level scaffold use). It is evident that more frequent use of higher-level scaffolds was found in later knowledge-building phase. Collectively, all these quantitative online behavioural and interactive measures indicate that students were progressively more able to focus on their collaborative group work. As an example, Figure 2 (left side) also illustrates an instance of students’ online knowledge-building behaviours focusing on inquiring how to reduce the noise produced from typing the keyboard. To address this problem, for example, students discussed various ideas such as “using keyboard protection sheet to reduce noise,” “writing by using touchpad instead of typing,” “designing better keyboard by using new materials”. Figure 2 (right side) also shows the overall behavioural pattern of the frequent interactions among students focusing on note-built-on activities.
source : Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 2016, 32(1). Ascilite
National Chengchi University, Taiwan
This study explored how students viewed the role of ideas for knowledge work and how such view was related to their inquiry activities. Data mainly came from students’ online interaction logs, group discussion and inquiry, and a survey concerning the role of ideas for knowledge work. The findings suggest that knowledge building was conducive to developing among students a more informed view of ideas that sees ideas as improvable, real-world objects for collaborative and creative knowledge work, rather than merely as abstract thoughts for achieving an individual’s own knowledge acquisition. Moreover, it was found that how a group views the role of ideas was associated with how they improve the quality of the ideas during their group inquiry.
Introduction
As argued by Reigeluth (2013), the educational paradigm before the 21st century was based on an
industrial model in which standardisation and the mass production of manufacturing is highly valued.
Under this paradigm, educational practice tends to highlight efficiency of individual knowledge
acquisition and accumulation by teaching learners the same content and skills that are predetermined by strict curriculum guidelines under a precise time frame (e.g., see Adams & Engelmann, 1996; Magliaro, Lockee, & Burton, 2005). Within such instructional practices, students are seldom given opportunities and autonomy to engage in self-directed inquiry that requires them to produce and continuously improve their ideas for knowledge work. However, given the rise of an information-driven and knowledge-based society (UNESCO, 2005), the industrial age–based educational paradigm is gradually giving way to a new economic model that favours customisation and a personalised information service (Reigeluth, 2013). As such, conventional educational practice is also shifting to focus more on cultivating competent and creative citizens who are able to work creatively and collaboratively with ideas for solving urgent environmental and social issues in service of the public good (Florida, 2002). This is in sharp contrast to traditional teaching in which ideas are often viewed as irrelevant and disruptive thoughts that interfere with the pre-specified teaching plan and classroom routines. Students with innovative ideas in class are sometimes even treated as unruly and misbehaved learners. Unsolicited ideas are especially highly unwelcome as they forbid teachers from completing their deliberate instructional goal and their assigned responsibilities for covering more curriculum materials in less time (Papert, 2000). Papert (2000) described such a situation that is commonly observed in most traditional learning environments as “idea aversion” (i.e., dislike of ideas). Inculcated with such a deep-rooted belief, it is unlikely for students to be given any chances of producing their own ideas and working innovatively with these ideas for collective knowledge advancement. It is also impossible for students to learn to appreciate the importance of ideas for creating new knowledge and solving real-world problems. The aim of this study was to improve understanding of how to foster students’ capacity to work collaboratively and innovatively with ideas and to help them develop a more informed view of the role of ideas for their knowledge work. The two research questions concerned in this study are (1) whether engaging students in knowledge building would help them enhance their online performance by working more cohesively as groups while collaboratively achieving their groups’ knowledge work and (2) whether students who are more engaged in knowledge-building activities would also be more likely to develop a more informed view that sees ideas as essential objects for sustained knowledge work.
Literature review
Fostering a design-mode of view for sustained idea improvement. One way to help students develop a deeper understanding and appreciation of “ideas” as essential objects for knowledge creation may be to engage students in actual “knowledge-building” activities (Hargreaves, 1999; Hong & Sullivan, 2009; Scardamalia & Bereiter, 2006). Knowledge building is defined as a collaborative process focused on sustained production and improvement of ideas in a community (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 2003). As an idea-centred pedagogical approach, knowledge building draws on Popper’s (1972, 1978) three-world epistemological position of constructivism. In addition to the physical/material world (world 1) and the psychological world existing in the human mind (world 2), Popper posited a world 3 reality that is mainly constituted of ideas. These ideas are produced by knowledge workers (e.g., engineers, scientists, designers, and architects), and, once created, they are embodied within a social life like tangible, real-world objects that can be further tinkered and experimented with by other knowledge agents and become more powerful solutions to problems. Under a world 3 view, therefore, ideas should be treated as tentative knowledge claims and be continuously subjected to critical scrutiny (e.g., through examination, clarification, and falsification) for further development. Likewise, in order to develop a successful knowledge-building community, its members also need to perceive the role of ideas as world 3 improvable objects for collective knowledge advancement (Scardamalia, 2002), rather than merely treating them as world 2 psychological constructs for achieving personal knowledge gain. Unfortunately, as cogently argued by Bereiter (1994), conventional classroom teaching tends to focus on instilling in students’ minds a prescribed body of
knowledge from a world 2 perspective, while neglecting the importance of cultivating students’
competencies to work with ideas in world 3.
To address this concern, it is important to distinguish two different modes of knowledge work: belief
mode and design mode (Bereiter, 2002; Bereiter & Scardamalia, 2003). To elaborate, the belief mode
emphasises the ability to evaluate ideas and/or knowledge claims using well-established and accepted true beliefs. Students’ intellectual life and classroom work in schools is conventionally dominated by such a mode of thinking. When students’ minds are functioning in a belief mode, they are often guided to ponder questions such as: Is this idea true or reasonable? What are the assumptions on which this idea is based? In contrast, the design mode of thinking highlights the ability to go beyond the pursuit of truth by engaging in sustained idea generation and improvement for knowledge advancement. When students are committed to a design mode of knowledge work, they tend to ask questions such as: What is the value of this idea? What is it good for? What can it or can it not do? How can it be further improved? While both modes are needed for knowledge work, a main epistemological difference between the two modes of view is that the belief mode tends to highlight knowledge acquisition and accumulation by viewing ideas as knowledge claims to be verified; whereas the design mode intends to facilitate innovative knowledge work by viewing ideas as improvable objects for knowledge advances (Cross, 2007).
One important thing to note is that engaging in a design-mode of knowledge work is, in essence, a
metacognitive process, as one has to constantly reflect and plan ahead in order to continually advance
ideas. Particularly from the perspective of knowledge building as a social process, the kind of metacognitive behaviours required for design-mode activities must be collectively (rather than
individually) attained. How a knowledge-building group sees the role of ideas and accordingly exercises its self-regulatory efforts can greatly influence the effectiveness of their knowledge advancement activities (Hong & Sullivan, 2009). Previous studies have also shown that productive collaborative knowledge work is greatly related to a group’s regulation activities (e.g., Dehler, Bodemer, Buder, & Hesse, 2011; Goos, Galbraith, & Renshaw, 2002).
Fostering the process of idea improvement
Hong and Sullivan (2009) proposed an idea-centred instructional framework to illustrate the
collaborative, emergent, and self-regulated process of sustained idea improvement in a typical
knowledge-building environment. This framework illustrates “idea generation”, “idea diversification”, and “idea elaboration” as three important activities for the process of effective idea improvement. First, in terms of idea generation, most research literature has considered it as an essential phase for productive knowledge or design work (e.g., Linsey et al., 2011), and an important line of empirical research has investigated effective instructional strategies or techniques to help idea generation (Faure, 2004; Miura & Hida, 2004; Mumford, 2001; Paulus & Yang, 2000; Rietzschel, Nijstad, & Stroebe, 2014). For example, Rietzschel et al.’s (2014) study found that when students were guided to work in a more narrowed (as contrasted with more broad) problem scope or when they were required to come up with ideas that were more original (as contrasted with more relevant), they were more likely to come up with innovative ideas. Hong, Chang, and Chai’s (2011) study found that it is more likely to foster idea generation when students are allowed to work on problems of their own interest and when the learning climate in an environment is perceived by learners as more open and creative. Second, from a socio-epistemological perspective (Fuller, 1988), idea diversification can be achieved by means of exchanging ideas or perspectives among members with distributed expertise. Previous research has suggested that idea exchange is critical to the process of knowledge advancement (Gong, Kim, Zhu, & Lee, 2013; Hong, Scardamalia, & Zhang, 2010; Perttula, Krause, & Sipilä, 2006). For example, Perttula et al.’s (2006) design experiment found that individuals who exchanged ideas were more likely to generate more ideas. Kohn, Paulus, and Choi (2011) conducted two experiments to explore the knowledge sharing process during which ideas are exchanged and/or combined in students’ brainstorming activities. They found that group endeavour was more effective than individual effort in generating more novel and viable idea combinations.
Thirdly, from the perspective of evolutionary epistemology (Popper, 1978), ideas can be refined by
community members acting as knowledge workers reflecting collaboratively on the potentials and
limitations of the ideas at issue. Previous studies have investigated ways of collaboration to help further elaborate ideas (e.g., Chen, Chuy, Resendes, Scardamalia, & Bereiter, 2011; Kipp, Bittner, Bretschneider, & Marco, 2014) and ways of idea elaboration that may enhance or hinder creative knowledge work (e.g., Kudrowitz & Wallace, 2013; Stark & Perfect, 2008; Verhaegen, Vandevenne, Peeters, & Duflou, 2013). For example, Kudrowitz and Wallace’s (2013) study found that the systematic use of a metric integrating three attributes (i.e., novelty, usefulness, and feasibility) as an elaboration means can be helpful in identifying more innovative ideas.
In a productive idea improvement process, once the initial ideas are generated, they need to be reified
(e.g., presented as a note or a message and contributed to an online database). Doing so helps transform these initial ideas from an individual’s mental constructs to become public property recorded permanently (e.g., in an online database). This is important as ideas conceived only in one’s mind (as world 2) cannot be treated as tangible objects for collective improvement. Further, the extent of idea diversification and exchange is a function of how ideas beget more ideas and interact with and relate to one another; and idea reflection or elaboration is a function of how collaborative knowledge workers try to increase the value of ideas and deepen their collective understanding of what the ideas can or cannot do to address the problem they are dealing with. In an optimal situation, idea improvement relies on an emerging process of idea generation, with idea diversification and idea elaboration serving as two essential social mechanisms closely intertwined to enable the transformation of initial ideas into more innovative ones (Chen, Scardamalia, Acosta, Resendes, & Kici, 2013).
Assessing ideas as outcomes of idea improvement
Along with an emerging knowledge-building process, ideas are expected to be transformed into tentative learning outcomes, including (1) initial ideas that are generated and contributed individually to a community’s database, (2) diversified ideas that are made possible through sharing/exchanging of or relating to the initial ideas, to (3) elaborated ideas that are further refined or modified continually by means of collaborative reflection among community members, and (4) more promising and valuable ideas that are made possible from opportunistically integrating diversified and elaborated ideas into more feasible solutions or coherent accounts for addressing a problem. When ideas as outcomes transformed from an emergent improvement process are to be treated as real-world material objects, it is likely for a knowledge-building group or class to form a complex collection of ideas (recorded in a database) that emulates a knowledge community or what Popper (1978) called world 3 reality
Results
Overall analysis of online performance
Pre-post comparisons were made between the early and later knowledge-building phases (using midterm as a separation point) for online activities (see Table 3). The rationale of using the two phases for analysis is because these two phases corresponded to the two main idea improvement activities, with the early knowledge-building phase highlighting more divergent idea-diversification activity and the later knowledge-building phase focusing on more convergent idea-elaboration activity. Overall, the frequency of all activities was quite consistent. There were no significant differences between the two phases in terms of all major online activities, except that there was a significant increase in the number of notes read in phase 2, which indicates increasing community awareness of group knowledge work (e.g., who was interacting or collaborating with whom in a group, and what ideas were being improved) towards the end of the course. Additionally, all the online measures were found significantly correlated with one another (all r’s > .43, p’s < .05, for all measures in phase 1; (all r’s > .31, p’s < .05, for all measures in phase 2; and all r’s > .60 p’s < .01, for all measures throughout the whole semester, e.g., see Table 4), which suggests that the more active the participants were in one type of online activity, the more likely they would be actively engaged in another type of activity.
As a main interest of this study is collaborative knowledge building, additional analysis of interaction
patterns was conducted using social network analysis. As shown in the bottom part of Table 3, overall, there was a descending trend in terms of network density from early knowledge-building to later knowledge-building phase for both note-reading and note-linking activities. Further, there was an ascending trend in terms of betweenness centrality from early to later phase (for note-reading only). To elaborate, relatively lower network density and higher betweenness centrality in the later phase implies that there were less whole community-based online activities and more focused small group-based activities. This may be because that the instructional design of this course encouraged students to progressively form groups and work within groups based on common interest in certain technology problems. Another explanation is that towards the end of the semester, within-group inquiry became more essential for completing each group’s final technological product. This is also confirmed by the fact that there were progressively more idea elaboration and intensive inquiry activities within groups (as shown by the higher-level scaffold use), rather than merely idea-sharing and shallow inquiry activities within the whole community and between groups (as shown by the lower-level scaffold use). It is evident that more frequent use of higher-level scaffolds was found in later knowledge-building phase. Collectively, all these quantitative online behavioural and interactive measures indicate that students were progressively more able to focus on their collaborative group work. As an example, Figure 2 (left side) also illustrates an instance of students’ online knowledge-building behaviours focusing on inquiring how to reduce the noise produced from typing the keyboard. To address this problem, for example, students discussed various ideas such as “using keyboard protection sheet to reduce noise,” “writing by using touchpad instead of typing,” “designing better keyboard by using new materials”. Figure 2 (right side) also shows the overall behavioural pattern of the frequent interactions among students focusing on note-built-on activities.
source : Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 2016, 32(1). Ascilite
Using Facebook as an e-portfolio in enhancing pre-service teachers’ professional development
Muhammad Kamarul Kabilan
Universiti Sains Malaysia
This study aims to determine if Facebook, when used as an online teacher portfolio (OTP), could contribute meaningfully to pre-service teachers’ professional development (PD) and in what ways the OTP can be meaningful. Pre-service teachers (n = 91) were asked to develop OTP using Facebook and engage in learning and professional development (PD) activities for 14 weeks. Questionnaires, open-ended items and reflective reports were used to collect data and it was found that many of the pre-service teachers benefitted quite significantly in terms of their development as future teachers through these five facets: (i) community of practice; (ii) professional learning and identity; (iii) relevant skills; (iv) resources; and (v) confidence.
Introduction
Pre-service teachers tend to be satisfied with their existing knowledge and practices, and seldom do they attempt to generate new knowledge, create and experiment with new practices or validate their own ideas (Alfonso, 2001; Kabilan, 2007). If this is not addressed, then these future teachers have the tendency to depend heavily on their preconceived ideas, thoughts and understandings of how they should teach, learn and develop as a teacher rather than consistently, constructively and critically reflect on their teaching practices.
Darling-Hammond (2006) suggests that in order to overcome deficiencies and other variables that influence teachers’ work and their effectiveness, one solution is to engage pre-service teachers in performance assessment, which will help pre-service teachers gain deeper understanding of what they lack and what they need to further improve. According to Darling -Hammond (2006), performance assessment has the capability to evaluate “what novice teachers have learned and organize learning, deliberately marrying knowledge and application, rather than assuming one automatically follows from the other” (p. 114). Eventually, pre-service teachers will progress towards enactment of knowledge and learning in practice rather than remain at a level of mere intellectual understanding. Examples of performance assessment include, among others, portfolio (and electronic portfolio), project work and
seminar presentations.
Creating and maintaining e-portfolio are advantageous to pre-service teachers because these practices provide them the “opportunity to consciously monitor and assess their own current knowledge and to understand pedagogical and subject contents continuously and consistently” (Kabilan & Khan, 2012; p. 1018). Electronic portfolios are also effective in guiding pre-service teachers’ independent learning, selfevaluation and reflective practices (Klenowski, 2000), creating a feeling of self-satisfaction as a future professional (Sherry & Bartlett, 2005), engaging in deep, sustainable and transformational learning experiences (Tosh, Werdmuller, Chen, Light, & Haywood, 2006), and enriching perspectives with diverse approaches, views and activities of learning (O’Brien, 2006).
In this study of Malaysian pre-service teachers, Facebook was chosen as the e-portfolio platform for two main reasons. First, Facebook is a popular social media and networking site with more than 1.23 billion active users (as of February 2014, http://zephoria.com) worldwide. In Malaysia, it is the most visited social media website with 10.4 million users, of which 3.5 million are learners aged between 18 and 24 (Subramaniam, 2014). Through Facebook, users can connect and interact with members of various communities with similar interests, and educators can support their learning and development individually and as a community of practice (Godwin-Jones, 2008). Second, despite Facebook’s popularity and the recognition that PD programmes and experiences can be provided with the aid of technology (Kabilan, 2005; Kabilan & Embi, 2006; Kabilan, Wan Adlina, & Embi, 2011), a literature search reveals that there is a paucity of research on the use of Facebook as an e-portfolio in enhancing teachers’ PD have been published.
Hence, this research utilised Facebook as an e-portfolio to enhance the PD of Malaysian pre-service teachers of various subjects and across curriculum. Pre-service teachers were selected because they often lack confidence and pedagogical content knowledge (Aida Suraya, Ramlah, Habsah, Sharifah Kartini, & Mat Rofa, 2006), awareness of meaningful classroom practices ( Kabilan, 2007), and assessment and teaching and learning practices (Nykvist, 2009 ). Apart from enriching the literature, this research provides researchers, educators and PD facilitators with valuable knowledge and insights into the potential of Facebook to engage individuals as a community of practice in meaningful and relevant costfree PD.
The main aims of the study were to determine if Facebook can be utilised as an e-portfolio to enhance pre-service teachers’ development experiences and to identify its benefits as an e -portfolio, particularly in terms of its contribution, if any, to the pre-service teachers’ development. This research was guided by the following research questions:
i. Can Facebook be utilised as an e-portfolio to enhance and support teacher PD meaningfully?
ii. How does the Facebook environment, when utilised as an e-portfolio, contribute meaningfully to
pre-service teachers’ PD experiences – individually and as a community of practice?
Literature review and theoretical perspectives
A review of Facebook use by students and teachers by Khe (2011) reveals that Facebook has “very little educational use” (p. 668) since there is limited empirical evidence to support such use. Junco (2015) suggests that Facebook may hinder learning processes and negatively influence academic performance. Furthermore, several key issues that concern privacy, safety and inappropriate contents in Facebook have curtailed its use in educational contexts. Papandrea (2012) critically highlights actual cases whereby some educational institutions have restricted electronic communication between teachers and students to avoid inappropriate relationships from developing. Kwan and Skoric (2013) too find that intensity of Facebook use and engagement may lead to bullying and victimisation of students in the Facebook community.
Nevertheless, Facebook can be a valuable pedagogical tool and a communicative platform (Papandera, 2012), as well as a meaningful learning environment (Kabilan, Ahmad, & Abidin, 2010). Roblyer, McDaniel, Webb, Herman, and Witty (2010) and Selwyn (2009) concur that researching Facebook is a worthwhile effort to understand future research and learning possibilities using online social media. It is considered by learners as a source of learning (Arouri, 2015) that can be harnessed for more effective distribution and sharing of learning materials and increased cooperative learning between students (Asterhan & Rosenberg, 2015). These meaningful activities and engagement on Facebook have cultivated weak learners to become comfortable while discussing, giving opinions and forging relationships with peers when online (Promnitz-Hayashi, 2011) due to the pedagogical, social and technological tools of Facebook as a learning management system (Wang, Woo, Quek, Yang, & Liu, 2012) that encourage,
support and sustain meaningful interaction between learners. In sharing information using Facebook, students are actually “communicating with larger audiences with whom they might have no personal relationship, but are doing so because they perceive the value of sharing their knowledge with the larger public” (Beach, 2012; p. 48).
In this study, the notion of community of practice (CoP) is integral. In terms of PD, the link between CoP and, the teachers’ practices and development is strong. This nexus raises pertinent issues such as the nature of socialisation in teaching practices, the type of CoP activities engaged in, the processes of CoPs that lead to productive PD and, the potentials of CoP in enhancing learning processes (Schwen & Hara, 2004). CoP is an activity system or groups of people or participants who share understandings about what they do and what that means in their lives and commun ity (Lave & Wenger, 1991). Other relevant aspects of PD using e-portfolio include: (a) sharing of sets of problems, common issues and passions about a topic; (b) exploring ideas and creating tools, standards and documents; and (c) deepening of knowledge and expertise by interacting with others on an ongoing basis (Wenger, McDermott & Snyder, 2002).
An important concept in CoP is the notion of domain – the problems and/or issues that members experience. Wenger, McDermott, and Snyder (2002) signify the importance of domain in organising the knowledge created by the CoP that assists the members to organise, share and distinguish ideas that are significant/insignificant ones. Members of a CoP are expected to commit to the domains and share practices that they have created in resolving the domains. Without this commitment, the CoP is rather meaningless. It is just a group with no aims and directions. According to Hardey, Tinney, and Davies (2012), such organisation of knowledge is an important facet of e-portfolio use that can lead to knowledge construction and refinement.
In e-portfolios, when teachers share and compare their knowledge organisation (in the form of artefacts) and construction, observations and understanding with others, learning is “transformed from a personal (learning) activity to a social (learning) activity” as the teachers are exposed to challenges and confrontations of their own “meanings through interaction with others” (Kanuka & Anderson, 1998; p. 74). This would facilitate PD in ways that include among others, confidence and self-growth (Kilbane & Milman, 2003); information and communication technology (ICT) skills (Abrami & Barrett, 2005); creativity (Campbell, Cignetti, Melenyzer, Nettles, & Wyman, 2004); meaningful learning (O’Brien, 2006); independent and collaborative learning (SongHao, Kenji, Takara, & Takashi, 2008); and pedagogical knowledge and skills (Kabilan & Khan, 2012). In terms of PD, using Facebook as an eportfolio is a systematic and deliberate decision to design a learning environment that promotes a meaningful learning culture, and utilize it as a platform that scaffolds relationships between learners (Lock, 2006), Many researchers regard Facebook as a meaningful socialisation tool that could be used for learning (see Ellison, Steinfield, & Lampe, 2007; Madge, Meek, Wellens, & Hooley, 2009). Therefore the
focus of this study is to discern if Facebook can be an appropriate online environment to integrate one’s individualistic learning activity into a meaningful and socially collaborative learning activity through e portfolio, and thus contribute significantly to the teachers’ PD.
The above individualistic learning resonates with Mezirow’s (1990, 2000) theory of transformative learning as “stages in cognitive restructuring and integration of experience, action, and reflection” (Stansberry & Kymes, 2007; p. 489), whereby individuals focus and learn as reflective learners. In addition, Willink and Jacobs (2012) assent that OTP can “foster transformation in teacher beliefs through critical reflection, ownership of learning, and personal agency” (p. 18). These are the features that are integrated into the OTP in this study, whereby elements of transformative learning, critical reflection and performance assessment, are interwoven – each overlapping each other and simultaneously, each affecting each other.
Methods
This study, conducted in a Malaysian university, utilised a mixed method research design, which involved the gathering of qualitative and quantitative data that provide a better understanding of how Facebook, when utilised as an e-portfolio, enhanced and supported meaningful pre-service teacher’ development experiences. This design enabled the drawing of a complete picture by identifying trend and generalisations, which include in-depth and comprehensive knowledge of participants’ perspectives (Creswell & Clark, 2007).
The participants and context of research
The participants involved in this research were 91 pre-service teachers (12 males and 79 females) from Universiti Sains Malaysia. All 91 were in their final semester of their Bachelor of Education academic programme. They specialised in various fields, including teaching English, mother tongue/native language, history, science and geography. They were enrolled in the Information and Communication Technology in Education course, which aimed to equip students with the knowledge and skills to use various current interactive ICT tools and the pedagogies of using them appropriately and effectively across the curriculum (Universiti Sains Malaysia, 2010). The course’s assessment was 100% coursework that focused on two online project works; one of it is the online teacher portfolio (OTP) that is worth 35 marks. As part of their course requirement, students were asked to individually create, develop and maintain an OTP using Facebook for 14 weeks and an individual report to explain their OTP.
OTP implementation
The purposes of creating, developing and maintaining an OTP were to: (a) describe, display, share and discuss/dissect their teaching philosophies; and (b) describe, display, share and discuss/dissect artefacts related to one’s own PD activities and experiences (past or current ones). The specific roles and activities hat were performed by the researcher and the participants (chronological order) during the 14 weeks
Implications and conclusion
Both quantitative and qualitative data confirm that Facebook is a potential tool for an OTP, one that can meaningfully enhance and support pre-service teachers’ PD. This is possible due to the features of the Facebook environment and the tools available in this online social media that encourage an interactive socialisation process. This includes: collaboration; sharing of experiences, ideas and artefacts and building them into an online resource/database; learning from each other; networking and connecting to each other; and the continuous practices of supporting and encouraging of each other. Through the above intricate and complex socialisation process in the OTP, most pre-service teachers in this study experienced transformative learning, critical reflection and performance assessment via personal learning and social learning in a CoP. through many of the activities, interaction s and engagements that they encountered during the OTP process. Their experiences lead to enriched ideas and experiences that facilitated (re)construction, (re)configuration, and (re)fining of knowledge that was personal and meaningful to individual members of the OTP, as well as to the OTP community as a whole.
They augmented their learning and development as a pre-service teacher, and realized the importance of engagement in future PD initiatives as an in-service teacher. Clearly, there is a nexus between transformative learning, critical reflection and performance assessment that are embedded in the OTP. This node leads to PD if both personal and social learning are heightened .
Although at the onset of the project participants were motivated by grades, they gradually began to identify the aforementioned socialisation processes as integral modes of self-learning and self-development. By selecting appropriate materials for the construction and development of their OTP , coupled with the various personal experiences and professional engagements in Facebook enabled participants to identify their professional portraits and discern the benefits and the overall value of OTP for their PD. The OTP process was able to bring and connect pre-service teachers from different backgrounds, regions, and cultures, in a virtual melting-pot for them to discover the views of different and diversified thoughts and perceptions of the world through a critical reflection and learning from the reflection of their own experiences. Previous research results suggest personal knowledge and experiences influence opinion and impact ones’ professional views, leading to construction and reconstruction of knowledge (see Kagan, 1992; Lai & Pek, 2012). Such influences add dimension to one’s existing knowledge, contributes to the profundity of pre-service teachers’ thoughts and ways of thinking and perceiving.
This study strengthens the notion forwarded by Darling-Hammond (2006) and Kabilan (2007), that empowering pre-service teachers is crucial in aiding them to make decisions and complete assignments in ways that generate ideas, views, knowledge and answers - ways that also engage them in the process of improving their effectiveness as future teachers. As the findings suggest and as supported by other research, using social networking such as Facebook as an OTP for pre-service teachers’ learning and development must include an understanding of its purpose and a clear conceptualisation of the envisioned e-portfolio. Walker and Cheng (1996) identified understanding of purpose and conceptualisation of PD as the two of the most significant features of an effective and meaningful PD programme . Also, instructors should support learning and development processes in the OTP , as recommended by Watkins (2013).
Kabilan and Khan (2012) believed that enlightening and engaging pre-service teachers in accepting OTP as a practice has future implications for their PD. Hence, future studies should also explore how instructors can support pre-service teachers’ learning and development using a social network environment such as Facebook as an OTP. In addition, the entwined relationship between personal and professional facets of socialising in OTP warrants further examination, especially how personal connections may lead to PD
On its own, Facebook is just another social network site but if used appropriately and purposefully, it offers an amalgamation of socialisation and professionalisation – two overlapping facets that influence and empower each other in meaningful and prevailing teacher education and development. Findings from this study indicate that an OTP embedded within a social network enhance s and supports pre-service teachers’ meaningful PD. Members become a community of practice, acquire professional learning and identity, and gain relevant pedagogical skills, resources and confidence. These are some of the tenets that most pre-service teachers in this study, as well as other contexts and settings, lack and need help with, and what teacher education programmes at many universities aim to achieve
Sourch : Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 2016, 32(1). 20 Ascilite
Universiti Sains Malaysia
This study aims to determine if Facebook, when used as an online teacher portfolio (OTP), could contribute meaningfully to pre-service teachers’ professional development (PD) and in what ways the OTP can be meaningful. Pre-service teachers (n = 91) were asked to develop OTP using Facebook and engage in learning and professional development (PD) activities for 14 weeks. Questionnaires, open-ended items and reflective reports were used to collect data and it was found that many of the pre-service teachers benefitted quite significantly in terms of their development as future teachers through these five facets: (i) community of practice; (ii) professional learning and identity; (iii) relevant skills; (iv) resources; and (v) confidence.
Introduction
Pre-service teachers tend to be satisfied with their existing knowledge and practices, and seldom do they attempt to generate new knowledge, create and experiment with new practices or validate their own ideas (Alfonso, 2001; Kabilan, 2007). If this is not addressed, then these future teachers have the tendency to depend heavily on their preconceived ideas, thoughts and understandings of how they should teach, learn and develop as a teacher rather than consistently, constructively and critically reflect on their teaching practices.
Darling-Hammond (2006) suggests that in order to overcome deficiencies and other variables that influence teachers’ work and their effectiveness, one solution is to engage pre-service teachers in performance assessment, which will help pre-service teachers gain deeper understanding of what they lack and what they need to further improve. According to Darling -Hammond (2006), performance assessment has the capability to evaluate “what novice teachers have learned and organize learning, deliberately marrying knowledge and application, rather than assuming one automatically follows from the other” (p. 114). Eventually, pre-service teachers will progress towards enactment of knowledge and learning in practice rather than remain at a level of mere intellectual understanding. Examples of performance assessment include, among others, portfolio (and electronic portfolio), project work and
seminar presentations.
Creating and maintaining e-portfolio are advantageous to pre-service teachers because these practices provide them the “opportunity to consciously monitor and assess their own current knowledge and to understand pedagogical and subject contents continuously and consistently” (Kabilan & Khan, 2012; p. 1018). Electronic portfolios are also effective in guiding pre-service teachers’ independent learning, selfevaluation and reflective practices (Klenowski, 2000), creating a feeling of self-satisfaction as a future professional (Sherry & Bartlett, 2005), engaging in deep, sustainable and transformational learning experiences (Tosh, Werdmuller, Chen, Light, & Haywood, 2006), and enriching perspectives with diverse approaches, views and activities of learning (O’Brien, 2006).
In this study of Malaysian pre-service teachers, Facebook was chosen as the e-portfolio platform for two main reasons. First, Facebook is a popular social media and networking site with more than 1.23 billion active users (as of February 2014, http://zephoria.com) worldwide. In Malaysia, it is the most visited social media website with 10.4 million users, of which 3.5 million are learners aged between 18 and 24 (Subramaniam, 2014). Through Facebook, users can connect and interact with members of various communities with similar interests, and educators can support their learning and development individually and as a community of practice (Godwin-Jones, 2008). Second, despite Facebook’s popularity and the recognition that PD programmes and experiences can be provided with the aid of technology (Kabilan, 2005; Kabilan & Embi, 2006; Kabilan, Wan Adlina, & Embi, 2011), a literature search reveals that there is a paucity of research on the use of Facebook as an e-portfolio in enhancing teachers’ PD have been published.
Hence, this research utilised Facebook as an e-portfolio to enhance the PD of Malaysian pre-service teachers of various subjects and across curriculum. Pre-service teachers were selected because they often lack confidence and pedagogical content knowledge (Aida Suraya, Ramlah, Habsah, Sharifah Kartini, & Mat Rofa, 2006), awareness of meaningful classroom practices ( Kabilan, 2007), and assessment and teaching and learning practices (Nykvist, 2009 ). Apart from enriching the literature, this research provides researchers, educators and PD facilitators with valuable knowledge and insights into the potential of Facebook to engage individuals as a community of practice in meaningful and relevant costfree PD.
The main aims of the study were to determine if Facebook can be utilised as an e-portfolio to enhance pre-service teachers’ development experiences and to identify its benefits as an e -portfolio, particularly in terms of its contribution, if any, to the pre-service teachers’ development. This research was guided by the following research questions:
i. Can Facebook be utilised as an e-portfolio to enhance and support teacher PD meaningfully?
ii. How does the Facebook environment, when utilised as an e-portfolio, contribute meaningfully to
pre-service teachers’ PD experiences – individually and as a community of practice?
Literature review and theoretical perspectives
A review of Facebook use by students and teachers by Khe (2011) reveals that Facebook has “very little educational use” (p. 668) since there is limited empirical evidence to support such use. Junco (2015) suggests that Facebook may hinder learning processes and negatively influence academic performance. Furthermore, several key issues that concern privacy, safety and inappropriate contents in Facebook have curtailed its use in educational contexts. Papandrea (2012) critically highlights actual cases whereby some educational institutions have restricted electronic communication between teachers and students to avoid inappropriate relationships from developing. Kwan and Skoric (2013) too find that intensity of Facebook use and engagement may lead to bullying and victimisation of students in the Facebook community.
Nevertheless, Facebook can be a valuable pedagogical tool and a communicative platform (Papandera, 2012), as well as a meaningful learning environment (Kabilan, Ahmad, & Abidin, 2010). Roblyer, McDaniel, Webb, Herman, and Witty (2010) and Selwyn (2009) concur that researching Facebook is a worthwhile effort to understand future research and learning possibilities using online social media. It is considered by learners as a source of learning (Arouri, 2015) that can be harnessed for more effective distribution and sharing of learning materials and increased cooperative learning between students (Asterhan & Rosenberg, 2015). These meaningful activities and engagement on Facebook have cultivated weak learners to become comfortable while discussing, giving opinions and forging relationships with peers when online (Promnitz-Hayashi, 2011) due to the pedagogical, social and technological tools of Facebook as a learning management system (Wang, Woo, Quek, Yang, & Liu, 2012) that encourage,
support and sustain meaningful interaction between learners. In sharing information using Facebook, students are actually “communicating with larger audiences with whom they might have no personal relationship, but are doing so because they perceive the value of sharing their knowledge with the larger public” (Beach, 2012; p. 48).
In this study, the notion of community of practice (CoP) is integral. In terms of PD, the link between CoP and, the teachers’ practices and development is strong. This nexus raises pertinent issues such as the nature of socialisation in teaching practices, the type of CoP activities engaged in, the processes of CoPs that lead to productive PD and, the potentials of CoP in enhancing learning processes (Schwen & Hara, 2004). CoP is an activity system or groups of people or participants who share understandings about what they do and what that means in their lives and commun ity (Lave & Wenger, 1991). Other relevant aspects of PD using e-portfolio include: (a) sharing of sets of problems, common issues and passions about a topic; (b) exploring ideas and creating tools, standards and documents; and (c) deepening of knowledge and expertise by interacting with others on an ongoing basis (Wenger, McDermott & Snyder, 2002).
An important concept in CoP is the notion of domain – the problems and/or issues that members experience. Wenger, McDermott, and Snyder (2002) signify the importance of domain in organising the knowledge created by the CoP that assists the members to organise, share and distinguish ideas that are significant/insignificant ones. Members of a CoP are expected to commit to the domains and share practices that they have created in resolving the domains. Without this commitment, the CoP is rather meaningless. It is just a group with no aims and directions. According to Hardey, Tinney, and Davies (2012), such organisation of knowledge is an important facet of e-portfolio use that can lead to knowledge construction and refinement.
In e-portfolios, when teachers share and compare their knowledge organisation (in the form of artefacts) and construction, observations and understanding with others, learning is “transformed from a personal (learning) activity to a social (learning) activity” as the teachers are exposed to challenges and confrontations of their own “meanings through interaction with others” (Kanuka & Anderson, 1998; p. 74). This would facilitate PD in ways that include among others, confidence and self-growth (Kilbane & Milman, 2003); information and communication technology (ICT) skills (Abrami & Barrett, 2005); creativity (Campbell, Cignetti, Melenyzer, Nettles, & Wyman, 2004); meaningful learning (O’Brien, 2006); independent and collaborative learning (SongHao, Kenji, Takara, & Takashi, 2008); and pedagogical knowledge and skills (Kabilan & Khan, 2012). In terms of PD, using Facebook as an eportfolio is a systematic and deliberate decision to design a learning environment that promotes a meaningful learning culture, and utilize it as a platform that scaffolds relationships between learners (Lock, 2006), Many researchers regard Facebook as a meaningful socialisation tool that could be used for learning (see Ellison, Steinfield, & Lampe, 2007; Madge, Meek, Wellens, & Hooley, 2009). Therefore the
focus of this study is to discern if Facebook can be an appropriate online environment to integrate one’s individualistic learning activity into a meaningful and socially collaborative learning activity through e portfolio, and thus contribute significantly to the teachers’ PD.
The above individualistic learning resonates with Mezirow’s (1990, 2000) theory of transformative learning as “stages in cognitive restructuring and integration of experience, action, and reflection” (Stansberry & Kymes, 2007; p. 489), whereby individuals focus and learn as reflective learners. In addition, Willink and Jacobs (2012) assent that OTP can “foster transformation in teacher beliefs through critical reflection, ownership of learning, and personal agency” (p. 18). These are the features that are integrated into the OTP in this study, whereby elements of transformative learning, critical reflection and performance assessment, are interwoven – each overlapping each other and simultaneously, each affecting each other.
Methods
This study, conducted in a Malaysian university, utilised a mixed method research design, which involved the gathering of qualitative and quantitative data that provide a better understanding of how Facebook, when utilised as an e-portfolio, enhanced and supported meaningful pre-service teacher’ development experiences. This design enabled the drawing of a complete picture by identifying trend and generalisations, which include in-depth and comprehensive knowledge of participants’ perspectives (Creswell & Clark, 2007).
The participants and context of research
The participants involved in this research were 91 pre-service teachers (12 males and 79 females) from Universiti Sains Malaysia. All 91 were in their final semester of their Bachelor of Education academic programme. They specialised in various fields, including teaching English, mother tongue/native language, history, science and geography. They were enrolled in the Information and Communication Technology in Education course, which aimed to equip students with the knowledge and skills to use various current interactive ICT tools and the pedagogies of using them appropriately and effectively across the curriculum (Universiti Sains Malaysia, 2010). The course’s assessment was 100% coursework that focused on two online project works; one of it is the online teacher portfolio (OTP) that is worth 35 marks. As part of their course requirement, students were asked to individually create, develop and maintain an OTP using Facebook for 14 weeks and an individual report to explain their OTP.
OTP implementation
The purposes of creating, developing and maintaining an OTP were to: (a) describe, display, share and discuss/dissect their teaching philosophies; and (b) describe, display, share and discuss/dissect artefacts related to one’s own PD activities and experiences (past or current ones). The specific roles and activities hat were performed by the researcher and the participants (chronological order) during the 14 weeks
Implications and conclusion
Both quantitative and qualitative data confirm that Facebook is a potential tool for an OTP, one that can meaningfully enhance and support pre-service teachers’ PD. This is possible due to the features of the Facebook environment and the tools available in this online social media that encourage an interactive socialisation process. This includes: collaboration; sharing of experiences, ideas and artefacts and building them into an online resource/database; learning from each other; networking and connecting to each other; and the continuous practices of supporting and encouraging of each other. Through the above intricate and complex socialisation process in the OTP, most pre-service teachers in this study experienced transformative learning, critical reflection and performance assessment via personal learning and social learning in a CoP. through many of the activities, interaction s and engagements that they encountered during the OTP process. Their experiences lead to enriched ideas and experiences that facilitated (re)construction, (re)configuration, and (re)fining of knowledge that was personal and meaningful to individual members of the OTP, as well as to the OTP community as a whole.
They augmented their learning and development as a pre-service teacher, and realized the importance of engagement in future PD initiatives as an in-service teacher. Clearly, there is a nexus between transformative learning, critical reflection and performance assessment that are embedded in the OTP. This node leads to PD if both personal and social learning are heightened .
Although at the onset of the project participants were motivated by grades, they gradually began to identify the aforementioned socialisation processes as integral modes of self-learning and self-development. By selecting appropriate materials for the construction and development of their OTP , coupled with the various personal experiences and professional engagements in Facebook enabled participants to identify their professional portraits and discern the benefits and the overall value of OTP for their PD. The OTP process was able to bring and connect pre-service teachers from different backgrounds, regions, and cultures, in a virtual melting-pot for them to discover the views of different and diversified thoughts and perceptions of the world through a critical reflection and learning from the reflection of their own experiences. Previous research results suggest personal knowledge and experiences influence opinion and impact ones’ professional views, leading to construction and reconstruction of knowledge (see Kagan, 1992; Lai & Pek, 2012). Such influences add dimension to one’s existing knowledge, contributes to the profundity of pre-service teachers’ thoughts and ways of thinking and perceiving.
This study strengthens the notion forwarded by Darling-Hammond (2006) and Kabilan (2007), that empowering pre-service teachers is crucial in aiding them to make decisions and complete assignments in ways that generate ideas, views, knowledge and answers - ways that also engage them in the process of improving their effectiveness as future teachers. As the findings suggest and as supported by other research, using social networking such as Facebook as an OTP for pre-service teachers’ learning and development must include an understanding of its purpose and a clear conceptualisation of the envisioned e-portfolio. Walker and Cheng (1996) identified understanding of purpose and conceptualisation of PD as the two of the most significant features of an effective and meaningful PD programme . Also, instructors should support learning and development processes in the OTP , as recommended by Watkins (2013).
Kabilan and Khan (2012) believed that enlightening and engaging pre-service teachers in accepting OTP as a practice has future implications for their PD. Hence, future studies should also explore how instructors can support pre-service teachers’ learning and development using a social network environment such as Facebook as an OTP. In addition, the entwined relationship between personal and professional facets of socialising in OTP warrants further examination, especially how personal connections may lead to PD
On its own, Facebook is just another social network site but if used appropriately and purposefully, it offers an amalgamation of socialisation and professionalisation – two overlapping facets that influence and empower each other in meaningful and prevailing teacher education and development. Findings from this study indicate that an OTP embedded within a social network enhance s and supports pre-service teachers’ meaningful PD. Members become a community of practice, acquire professional learning and identity, and gain relevant pedagogical skills, resources and confidence. These are some of the tenets that most pre-service teachers in this study, as well as other contexts and settings, lack and need help with, and what teacher education programmes at many universities aim to achieve
Sourch : Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 2016, 32(1). 20 Ascilite
Senin, 16 November 2015
Instructional Improvement of Secondary School Teachers through Effective Academic Supervision by the Vice-Principals
Orenaiya Solomon Adewale 1
Journal of Education and Human Development
June 2014, Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 607-617
ISSN: 2334-296X (Print), 2334-2978 (Online)
Copyright © The Author(s). 2014. All Rights Reserved.
Published by American Research Institute for Policy Development
Astract
Academic supervision and teachers’ classroom instruction are two instructional
activities which closely related with the intention of developing teachers to the
required higher level of instructional competencies. Research questions and
hypotheses were formulated to provide insight into the instructional improvement
level of classroom teachers by the effective monitoring by the vice-principal. The
role of vice-principal as instructional leaders is to influence the quality of secondary
school education. The teachers’ improvement level will be evaluated in mastery of
subject matter, teaching skills, and use of teaching resources. From the internal
academic supervision, there are three levels namely; the upper level (principals/viceprincipals), middle level (head of departments) and the lower level (subject
heads).From all indications, internal academic supervision is the sure best for
improving the present quality and also maintaining higher standards because of its
ease of access, cordial relationship to teachers for monitoring, correction and
entrenchment of ideas and innovations. The implication of this paper is to be
manifested in instructional practices which will facilitate students’ learning status to
improve to higher level of academic achievement which we all desired by all
stakeholders in education.
Keywords: Instructional improvement, secondary school teachers, effective
supervision, vice-principals and Nigeria
Introduction
The last ten to twelve years of educational performance and evaluation in
Ogun State, Nigeria had witnessed a drastic down trend in the academic performance
of secondary school students, dwindling image of teachers and academic and
economic values of secondary education in its entirety.
This could be due to a number of factors from the parents, students,
Governmenteducational policies, teachers highly accused, and Government’s agency
responsible for control, monitoring and supervision and economic recessio n and
political instability. The most influential and impacting to the existing status is the
supervision which hither to had been the sole responsibility of external supervisors
from the Governmental agencies such as inspectorate services of the ministry of
education and teaching service commission but their effects were not reflected in the
academic performance of students because of distance between them and teachers on
the field, thus vice principals are academically and professionally qualified to
effectively complement and further supervise classroom instruction for higher level
performance. An effective vice principal will develop teachers, while an effectiveness
in teaching will produce academically and economically good students that will be
useful to themselves, parents ,government and society at large.
Therefore, nature of academic supervision responsibility required from the
vice-principals is to focus on the process of overseeing what the teachers teach, the
medium of teaching, how the teaching is done and giving solutions to challenges. The
processes encompasses spending quite number of hours/periods on teachers’ content
of instruction, usage of teaching materials and demonstrate the expected practices that
will improve academic achievement of students in examinations. This is because the
most significant criteria or factor directly influencing the quality of the education a
child receives is the quality of his teacher.
The principals and vice-principals have tailored their daily activities in schools
to administrative supervision, leaving the academic supervision barely open to
external supervisors whose efforts have no continuity and constancy, thereby
academic achievements of students under the responsibility of teachers have continue
to be declining. This has provided escape route for external supervisors to declare that
they have played their own part, what is now left is for the teachers to do their own
part.
And to be practical, there is a wide gap between external supervisors and
teachers, which the vice principals can academically and professionally filled as
connectors and implementers between supervisors and teachers of which my paper
want to fill the missing gap. A question requiring answer is “where does the viceprincipal derive their positional role as instructional leader”?
The simple answer is that the teaching service ‘s teachers ‘manual of Ogun
State teaching service commission confers the position of principal as the
instructional leader, academic and administrative heads. It further states that the vice
principal is to assist principal in the day to day activities of the school and act in the
absence of the principal. The principal is the headteacher, instructionalsupervisor,
chief education officer, executor of instructional programme, teacher of teachers and
curriculum directorNakpodia( 2011)
Cawood&Gibbon (1990) opined academic supervision in terms of leadership
aims at renewal of objectives, professional growth and educational improvements
also; Gorton (1983) defined academic supervision as those activities engaged by
individual, groups whose main purpose is the improvement of person, group or
programme. I will end this introductory review with Beach&Reinhartz (2000) while
emphasizing that supervisors should be mentors and friends in relationships to
support teachers and provide support in a relaxed atmosphere for providing learning
environment in the classroom.
Therefore, the various elements or constructs in the definitions above such as
interactions,/relationship ,co-operative behaviours ,leaderships,mentors,support to
teachers and improvement which the vice-principals can and will fill adequately and
efficiently in this paper.Moreover,the content of this paper will focus on the following
areas of academic supervision on mastery of subject matter, usage of teaching
resources and teaching skills. The effectiveness of instructional supervision implies
that a desired effect will be observed to take place as an improvement in the teachers’
teaching process supervised by the vice-principals in secondary schools.
Objectives of the Paper
1.To improve the quality of secondary school education through regular instructional
supervision in the classroom.
2.To measure effectiveness of instructional supervision in relation to teachers level of
instruction.
3. To find out the contribution of the frequency of vice principals’ visitation to
classrooms for instructional monitoring.
4. To find out if there is a relationship between vice principals and teachers in
instructional improvement of secondary schools.
5. To ascertain if vice-principals have portfolio documents for professional growth
of teachers.
Statement of Problem
Since the last ten years of academic achievement results of secondary school
students released by the internal and external examination bodies in Ogun State,
Nigeria has not been impressive. This has generated negative comments and poor
evaluation on the part of teachers, educationinspectors, recruitment agency for
teachers and the government for not alive to their responsibility.
The state and federal government responded by conceiving and conceding to
re-organise the inspectorate department so that education inspectors/external
supervisors would be more effective in their duties to improve instructions in
secondary schools FGN(2006).
The irregularity and low frequency of visitation to schools by education
inspectors because of transportation challenges and low numbers of staff in their
department makes the problem unresolved thus form the platform to look inward
into the school site to find a connector who will continue from where external
supervisors stops and serve as a bridge between education inspectors and teachers
hence the reason underlying my resolve to conduct a study on the contributory role of
vice-principal in ensuring instructional improvement of teaching workforce in
secondary schools.
In addition to the above justification, is that the principals are surrounded
with administrative and social matters justified their less concentration on academics
but vice principals who sits endlessly in the office without any designated duties as
some principals exclude their vices or deputies from administrative duties support the
need for the principals to concede academic supervision to their vices while countersupervise or demand for daily or weekly report of instructional duties in the schools.
Instructional supervision is less monitored or not done at all in secondary schools
because the external supervisors such as the education inspectors, zonal secretaries are
not impacting positively over long period of time because their periods of visitations
is low or extremely scanty.
In addition, the quality of supervision may be doubtful because most external
supervisors are highly deficient in most subject mastery an d professional competence,
thus there is no guarantee for increased performance of teachers. This is in support of
Ogunlabi (2008).
Among other reasons for improving instruction in schools is that large
percentages of teaching workforce in most states in Nigeria are not professionally
certified unlike in the developed countries where no one can teach in secondary
schools except you are academically and professionally certified, as such there is
another opportunity to learn required teaching methodology while on the job.
Most importantly, there is a missing gap in the implementation of policies,
practices and instructional innovations between external supervisors and teachers as
such vice principals would play a complimentary role to ensure effectiveness of best
practices in the secondary school system.
Research Questions
This paper would attempt to provide answers to the following;
1. How is instructional supervision carried out in secondary schools in Ogun State,
Nigeria?
2. How is effective supervision going to be carried out in secondary schools?
3. To what extent does vice principals monitoring/supervision of classroom
teachers’ instruction influencestudents’ performance?
4. How should we improve instructional supervision by vice principals in
secondary schools?
Significance of the Study
1. To ensure accountability and increased level of teachers instructions in the
secondary school.
2. To encourage frequency of instructional supervision at the classroom level.
3. For achieving increased level of students’ academic performance in school.
4. To establish co-operative attitudes in teachers toward academic supervision.
5. To achieve educational effectiveness and quality improvement.
Theoretical Construct: Theory of Student-Centred Accountability and
Connection
A theory developed by Marzano (2003)and improved upon by Reeves (
2004).The focus of this theory is emphasized on instructional leaders, instruction and
students in order to improve teaching and learning processes. For fuller
understanding of instructional supervision by supervisors, certain factors fundamental
for coverage by this theory are instructional leaders, frequency of supervision,
teachingskills, mastery of subject matter, curriculum, andinstruction. Accountability of
student centered learning cannot be achieved if there has not been effective input
from teachers, and for the students centered to improve vice supervisors must visits
classroom daily or regularly through observation and recognition of best practices.
Content
A supervisor is a person engaged in conducting instructional monitoring or
supervision. Those persons are education inspectors, zonalsecretaries, principals, vice
principals, head of staff, head of departments, subjectheads, form cocoordinators/class co-ordinators.The concept of instructional supervision is a
classroom based supervision conducted by external and internal supervision for the
purpose of provision of guidance, support and continuous evaluation of teachers for
improvement in teaching and learning process and profe ssional development through
collegial approach.(Beach&Reinhartz;2000 &Tyagi,2010).
Fullan(2007) stated why there is no effectiveness in supervision of instruction
in classrooms is because principals and vice principals spend most school time in their
offices managing facilities, resolving students’ indiscipline, purchase of office and
facilities materials thereby devoting less time or no time to instructional matters.
In a related development, Bloom et al(2003) echoed that principals and team
of supervisors who receives coaching are more engaged in instructional leadership,
spends more time on instructional issues, addressing those issues than those without
any knowledge of coaching.
UNESCO (2007)&WORLD BANK,(2011),reported that there is a growing
conviction that empowerment of school-site supervision can make school respond to
needs of students. The monitoring of teachers is a guarantee for better qualities which
is possible with co-operation between principals, and teachers including the vice
principals. This author is of the view that with vice principals always available in
classroom monitoring will ensure teachers ‘ usage of instructional time, check pupils
books, give classwork and assignments which automatically discourages perpentual
absentees and late comers.
The scope of the content of this paper will cover mastery of subject matter,
teaching materials and teaching skills which the vice principals will execute properly to
ensure increase level in academic achievement in secondary schools.
Mastery Of Subject Matter
Kimberly (2009) stated that teachers must have sufficient knowledge in their
areas of study. Therefore, effectiveness of teaching and learning can best be measured
by teachers’ level of teachers’ capability in subject mastery which have direct impact
and a good predictor of students learning. In like manner, Adegbile&Adeyemi (2008)
confirmed that usage of highly knowledgeable in his area of specialization in low
performance students will eventually be rewarding. Competency in subject
matter/content in association with teaching skills, while teacher-student relationship
are connecting variables that can improve academic achievement of secondary school
students.
Teaching Resources
Instructional resources or teaching resources are instructional materials for
conveying essential knowledge and skill of subject in school curriculum. Teaching
resources suitable and available for use in secondary school’s instructional process are
books, workbooks, computer software, maps, wall charts, flip charts and academic
libraries. In a research carried out by Popoola (1990) investigated the effects of
instructional materials on the academic achievement of students in some secondary
schools. He compared the West African Examinations Council results fo r five years
and compares d achievement of students in schools with inadequate teaching
resources and found a significant difference in the achievement of the two sets of
students.
The vice principals have a significant role to monitor usage and records of
teaching resources in a pool or in school stores from school’s purchase or produce
teaching aids and shared among teachers for use in the classrooms. Every school
should keep an inventory of available teaching aids by quantity and conditions for use.
The teaching aids inventory should be able to show frequency usage of each resource
on a weekly basis. It must be emphasized that teaching and learning materials are
determinant of quality of education, thus it is essential for quality teaching materials to
be made available to teachers and students in adequate quantity to support teaching
and learning processes.
Teaching Skills
Reigner(2000)&Berry,B.(2011) reiterates that teachers needs to be
curious,imaginative,interesting,friendly and hard working in order to be effective in
the classroom, thereby creating a learning environment that results in enhancing
learners disposition. Interesting teachers keep students alive, attentive and focused based to hear and learn more from classroom instruction.
The nature of effective teaching skills is that the teacher should renew and
innovate, and enlighten the minds of students so that linkage can be established
between past, present and build positive hope by preparing them to build meaningful
knowledge for correct application.
An effective teacher realize that students learn in a diverse ways hence, a
skilled teacher should adjust lessons to reach all students, responding to multiples of
learning in classroom in addition to usage of remediation and enhancement,
responding to students need and getting students actively engaged in the lesson will
increase rate of retention and reproduction .Therefore, effective teaching skills are
essential to successful school outcomes resulting from instructional supervision by
vice principals.
Researches and experiences had revealed that teachers’ actions in their
classroom especially teaching skills have twice impact on students’ achievement as do
school policies regarding curriculum, assessment, staff collegiality and community
involvement Marzano (2003).
Challenges
1. The vice principal knowledge on the new instructional practices gained from
attending conferences, seminars and training of external supervisors may be
limiting.
2. Overburden of vice principals with some administrative duties of conducting
examination, carrying out special duties as it is mandatory for vice principals to
carry out instructions from the principals as his role is that of assistants.
4. There may not be absolute authority given to vice principals to back-up the
academic responsibility in order to deal with erring teachers and ensure realization
of goals and objectives of teaching.
5. There may be possibility of clash of interest of power between principals to
absolutely hand over academic tasks to vice principals with power and authority as
some teachers might play themselves in-between the two power personality of
administering the school effectively.
6.. The vice principals’ overzealousness for absolute power and decisions regarding
instructional monitoring.
Conclusions
Teachers’ effectiveness in classroom instruction in evaluated with their
mastery of subject matter, teaching resources, teaching skills and school records have
impacts on learners’ academic achievement.
This is in agreement with Campbell,J.M.(2004) that teachers’ level of
instruction arising from instructional supervision under the office of vice principals
will ensure effectiveness resulting in improved academic achievement of students in
the secondary schools in Ogun State, Nigeria.
Recommendations and Suggestions
1.vice principals should co-opt the most senior members of staff/head of staff as
workload shared is half-solved to avoid stress and excess burdens ,this will be a
breeding ground for excellence and continuation of good value. More so that
most senior members of staff will soon be assigned vice principal-ship
position/duty –post.
2. Vice-principals should be given one or two periods per week in a lower class to
serve as good role models so that instructions will b e matched with
action/activity.
3.Training should be given to vice principals on the nature, process, roles and
limitations of academic responsibility in relation to principals(superior boss) and
external supervisors from ministry of education, teaching service commission(
regulating and supervising agencies).This can be a good avenue to deploy
experienced supervisors on ad-hoc(short) and permanent position and use vice
principals as resource-persons as those who performs such job are less ranked and
equipped with fewer experiences on instructional level of teachers.
4.Vice principals can occasionally be part of supervision or inspection team as
observer to further learn the rudiments of measuring scales and check-list for
application in their various schools to ensure effective connection between external
supervisors and teachers for effectiveness in academic activities for productiveness
towards students in secondary schools/secondary education.
5.Let there be a policy in place to deploy experienced vice principals to the
inspectorate department of the ministry of education to give required experiences
to new and inexperienced education inspectors for stability and quality
effectiveness of instructional supervision in schools.
6.There should be a policy statement for the vice principals to be given constitutional
duties in the school with authority for effectiveness of work assigned and to also
give good image to the office of vice principal.
References
Adegbile, J.A&Adeyemi, B.A (2008).Enhancing quality assurance through teachers’
effectiveness.Ile-Ife, Nigeria. AcademicJournals, Volume 3(2) pages 61-63.Assessed
on December 2013 from http://www.academicjournals.org/ERR.
Beach, D.M&Reinhartz,J.(2000).A book on supervisory leadership focusing on
instruction.Boston:Allyn and Bacon.
Bloom G.G.,Castagna,C&Warren,B. (2003).The principals and coaching requirement. Volume
10.
Berry,B.(2011).Teacherpreneurs:A more powerful vision for the teaching profession. Phi
Delta Kappan,92(6),28-33.
Campbell, J.M. (2004).Resources for professional supervision and clinical supervision. A
handbook for practioners.Authored by J.M Campbell published in 2004.
Cawood, J & Gibbon, J. (1990). Educational Leadership. Staff development. Capetown:
Nasou.University of Zululand Institutional
Repository.http://uir.unisa.ac.za/bitstream/handle/105001/1432/03 .
Federal Government of Nigeria (FGN 2006).A handbook on the federal ministry of
education.
Fullan, M (2007).The meaning of educational change 4thedition New York College Press..
Gorton, R.A (1983).LB 1503373, 1983.Encyclopedia of schools administration and
supervision by Richard, A.Gorton et al.editors. phonix, AZ.Oryx Press,
1988.RefLB2805.
Marzano, R.J. (2003).What works in school: Translating research into action. Alexandria, VA:
Association for school supervision and curriculum development. The key to
classroom management by ASCD.
Nakpodia, E.D (2011).An Empirical Assessment of principal’ supervision capacity. Journal of
Education and Technology, Volume 1, Number 1, April 2011, pages 15-24.
Ogunlabi,S.B(2008).The effects of instructional resources on academic performances of
secondary school pupils in Kwara State, Nigeria.
Popoola,T.A(1990)An investigation into the relationship between instructional resources and
students’ academic performance in secondary schools in Abeokuta, Ogun
State,Nigeria.An unpublished MEd Thesis.
Reeves,D.G(2004).Accountability for learning: how teachers and school leaders can take
charge/Reeves, Douglas, B, Alexandria, VA:ASCD,2004. Subjects: Educational
Accountability, School Improvement Programs.
Reigner,S et al(2000).Creating sustainable teacher career pathways. A 21
st
Century Imperative
Published byPearson.Assessed on 8/1/2014 from
http://researchnetwork,pearson.com/wp-contend/uploads/CSTCP 21 CI pkfinal
web.
Tyagi,R.S(2010).School-based Instructional Supervision and the effectiveness professional of
teachers project report, department of educational administration. NEUPA, New
Delhi.
UNESCO (2007)&WORLD BANK(2011)Instructional Supervision in Primary Schools in
Third World Countries.
Journal of Education and Human Development
June 2014, Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 607-617
ISSN: 2334-296X (Print), 2334-2978 (Online)
Copyright © The Author(s). 2014. All Rights Reserved.
Published by American Research Institute for Policy Development
Astract
Academic supervision and teachers’ classroom instruction are two instructional
activities which closely related with the intention of developing teachers to the
required higher level of instructional competencies. Research questions and
hypotheses were formulated to provide insight into the instructional improvement
level of classroom teachers by the effective monitoring by the vice-principal. The
role of vice-principal as instructional leaders is to influence the quality of secondary
school education. The teachers’ improvement level will be evaluated in mastery of
subject matter, teaching skills, and use of teaching resources. From the internal
academic supervision, there are three levels namely; the upper level (principals/viceprincipals), middle level (head of departments) and the lower level (subject
heads).From all indications, internal academic supervision is the sure best for
improving the present quality and also maintaining higher standards because of its
ease of access, cordial relationship to teachers for monitoring, correction and
entrenchment of ideas and innovations. The implication of this paper is to be
manifested in instructional practices which will facilitate students’ learning status to
improve to higher level of academic achievement which we all desired by all
stakeholders in education.
Keywords: Instructional improvement, secondary school teachers, effective
supervision, vice-principals and Nigeria
Introduction
The last ten to twelve years of educational performance and evaluation in
Ogun State, Nigeria had witnessed a drastic down trend in the academic performance
of secondary school students, dwindling image of teachers and academic and
economic values of secondary education in its entirety.
This could be due to a number of factors from the parents, students,
Governmenteducational policies, teachers highly accused, and Government’s agency
responsible for control, monitoring and supervision and economic recessio n and
political instability. The most influential and impacting to the existing status is the
supervision which hither to had been the sole responsibility of external supervisors
from the Governmental agencies such as inspectorate services of the ministry of
education and teaching service commission but their effects were not reflected in the
academic performance of students because of distance between them and teachers on
the field, thus vice principals are academically and professionally qualified to
effectively complement and further supervise classroom instruction for higher level
performance. An effective vice principal will develop teachers, while an effectiveness
in teaching will produce academically and economically good students that will be
useful to themselves, parents ,government and society at large.
Therefore, nature of academic supervision responsibility required from the
vice-principals is to focus on the process of overseeing what the teachers teach, the
medium of teaching, how the teaching is done and giving solutions to challenges. The
processes encompasses spending quite number of hours/periods on teachers’ content
of instruction, usage of teaching materials and demonstrate the expected practices that
will improve academic achievement of students in examinations. This is because the
most significant criteria or factor directly influencing the quality of the education a
child receives is the quality of his teacher.
The principals and vice-principals have tailored their daily activities in schools
to administrative supervision, leaving the academic supervision barely open to
external supervisors whose efforts have no continuity and constancy, thereby
academic achievements of students under the responsibility of teachers have continue
to be declining. This has provided escape route for external supervisors to declare that
they have played their own part, what is now left is for the teachers to do their own
part.
And to be practical, there is a wide gap between external supervisors and
teachers, which the vice principals can academically and professionally filled as
connectors and implementers between supervisors and teachers of which my paper
want to fill the missing gap. A question requiring answer is “where does the viceprincipal derive their positional role as instructional leader”?
The simple answer is that the teaching service ‘s teachers ‘manual of Ogun
State teaching service commission confers the position of principal as the
instructional leader, academic and administrative heads. It further states that the vice
principal is to assist principal in the day to day activities of the school and act in the
absence of the principal. The principal is the headteacher, instructionalsupervisor,
chief education officer, executor of instructional programme, teacher of teachers and
curriculum directorNakpodia( 2011)
Cawood&Gibbon (1990) opined academic supervision in terms of leadership
aims at renewal of objectives, professional growth and educational improvements
also; Gorton (1983) defined academic supervision as those activities engaged by
individual, groups whose main purpose is the improvement of person, group or
programme. I will end this introductory review with Beach&Reinhartz (2000) while
emphasizing that supervisors should be mentors and friends in relationships to
support teachers and provide support in a relaxed atmosphere for providing learning
environment in the classroom.
Therefore, the various elements or constructs in the definitions above such as
interactions,/relationship ,co-operative behaviours ,leaderships,mentors,support to
teachers and improvement which the vice-principals can and will fill adequately and
efficiently in this paper.Moreover,the content of this paper will focus on the following
areas of academic supervision on mastery of subject matter, usage of teaching
resources and teaching skills. The effectiveness of instructional supervision implies
that a desired effect will be observed to take place as an improvement in the teachers’
teaching process supervised by the vice-principals in secondary schools.
Objectives of the Paper
1.To improve the quality of secondary school education through regular instructional
supervision in the classroom.
2.To measure effectiveness of instructional supervision in relation to teachers level of
instruction.
3. To find out the contribution of the frequency of vice principals’ visitation to
classrooms for instructional monitoring.
4. To find out if there is a relationship between vice principals and teachers in
instructional improvement of secondary schools.
5. To ascertain if vice-principals have portfolio documents for professional growth
of teachers.
Statement of Problem
Since the last ten years of academic achievement results of secondary school
students released by the internal and external examination bodies in Ogun State,
Nigeria has not been impressive. This has generated negative comments and poor
evaluation on the part of teachers, educationinspectors, recruitment agency for
teachers and the government for not alive to their responsibility.
The state and federal government responded by conceiving and conceding to
re-organise the inspectorate department so that education inspectors/external
supervisors would be more effective in their duties to improve instructions in
secondary schools FGN(2006).
The irregularity and low frequency of visitation to schools by education
inspectors because of transportation challenges and low numbers of staff in their
department makes the problem unresolved thus form the platform to look inward
into the school site to find a connector who will continue from where external
supervisors stops and serve as a bridge between education inspectors and teachers
hence the reason underlying my resolve to conduct a study on the contributory role of
vice-principal in ensuring instructional improvement of teaching workforce in
secondary schools.
In addition to the above justification, is that the principals are surrounded
with administrative and social matters justified their less concentration on academics
but vice principals who sits endlessly in the office without any designated duties as
some principals exclude their vices or deputies from administrative duties support the
need for the principals to concede academic supervision to their vices while countersupervise or demand for daily or weekly report of instructional duties in the schools.
Instructional supervision is less monitored or not done at all in secondary schools
because the external supervisors such as the education inspectors, zonal secretaries are
not impacting positively over long period of time because their periods of visitations
is low or extremely scanty.
In addition, the quality of supervision may be doubtful because most external
supervisors are highly deficient in most subject mastery an d professional competence,
thus there is no guarantee for increased performance of teachers. This is in support of
Ogunlabi (2008).
Among other reasons for improving instruction in schools is that large
percentages of teaching workforce in most states in Nigeria are not professionally
certified unlike in the developed countries where no one can teach in secondary
schools except you are academically and professionally certified, as such there is
another opportunity to learn required teaching methodology while on the job.
Most importantly, there is a missing gap in the implementation of policies,
practices and instructional innovations between external supervisors and teachers as
such vice principals would play a complimentary role to ensure effectiveness of best
practices in the secondary school system.
Research Questions
This paper would attempt to provide answers to the following;
1. How is instructional supervision carried out in secondary schools in Ogun State,
Nigeria?
2. How is effective supervision going to be carried out in secondary schools?
3. To what extent does vice principals monitoring/supervision of classroom
teachers’ instruction influencestudents’ performance?
4. How should we improve instructional supervision by vice principals in
secondary schools?
Significance of the Study
1. To ensure accountability and increased level of teachers instructions in the
secondary school.
2. To encourage frequency of instructional supervision at the classroom level.
3. For achieving increased level of students’ academic performance in school.
4. To establish co-operative attitudes in teachers toward academic supervision.
5. To achieve educational effectiveness and quality improvement.
Theoretical Construct: Theory of Student-Centred Accountability and
Connection
A theory developed by Marzano (2003)and improved upon by Reeves (
2004).The focus of this theory is emphasized on instructional leaders, instruction and
students in order to improve teaching and learning processes. For fuller
understanding of instructional supervision by supervisors, certain factors fundamental
for coverage by this theory are instructional leaders, frequency of supervision,
teachingskills, mastery of subject matter, curriculum, andinstruction. Accountability of
student centered learning cannot be achieved if there has not been effective input
from teachers, and for the students centered to improve vice supervisors must visits
classroom daily or regularly through observation and recognition of best practices.
Content
A supervisor is a person engaged in conducting instructional monitoring or
supervision. Those persons are education inspectors, zonalsecretaries, principals, vice
principals, head of staff, head of departments, subjectheads, form cocoordinators/class co-ordinators.The concept of instructional supervision is a
classroom based supervision conducted by external and internal supervision for the
purpose of provision of guidance, support and continuous evaluation of teachers for
improvement in teaching and learning process and profe ssional development through
collegial approach.(Beach&Reinhartz;2000 &Tyagi,2010).
Fullan(2007) stated why there is no effectiveness in supervision of instruction
in classrooms is because principals and vice principals spend most school time in their
offices managing facilities, resolving students’ indiscipline, purchase of office and
facilities materials thereby devoting less time or no time to instructional matters.
In a related development, Bloom et al(2003) echoed that principals and team
of supervisors who receives coaching are more engaged in instructional leadership,
spends more time on instructional issues, addressing those issues than those without
any knowledge of coaching.
UNESCO (2007)&WORLD BANK,(2011),reported that there is a growing
conviction that empowerment of school-site supervision can make school respond to
needs of students. The monitoring of teachers is a guarantee for better qualities which
is possible with co-operation between principals, and teachers including the vice
principals. This author is of the view that with vice principals always available in
classroom monitoring will ensure teachers ‘ usage of instructional time, check pupils
books, give classwork and assignments which automatically discourages perpentual
absentees and late comers.
The scope of the content of this paper will cover mastery of subject matter,
teaching materials and teaching skills which the vice principals will execute properly to
ensure increase level in academic achievement in secondary schools.
Mastery Of Subject Matter
Kimberly (2009) stated that teachers must have sufficient knowledge in their
areas of study. Therefore, effectiveness of teaching and learning can best be measured
by teachers’ level of teachers’ capability in subject mastery which have direct impact
and a good predictor of students learning. In like manner, Adegbile&Adeyemi (2008)
confirmed that usage of highly knowledgeable in his area of specialization in low
performance students will eventually be rewarding. Competency in subject
matter/content in association with teaching skills, while teacher-student relationship
are connecting variables that can improve academic achievement of secondary school
students.
Teaching Resources
Instructional resources or teaching resources are instructional materials for
conveying essential knowledge and skill of subject in school curriculum. Teaching
resources suitable and available for use in secondary school’s instructional process are
books, workbooks, computer software, maps, wall charts, flip charts and academic
libraries. In a research carried out by Popoola (1990) investigated the effects of
instructional materials on the academic achievement of students in some secondary
schools. He compared the West African Examinations Council results fo r five years
and compares d achievement of students in schools with inadequate teaching
resources and found a significant difference in the achievement of the two sets of
students.
The vice principals have a significant role to monitor usage and records of
teaching resources in a pool or in school stores from school’s purchase or produce
teaching aids and shared among teachers for use in the classrooms. Every school
should keep an inventory of available teaching aids by quantity and conditions for use.
The teaching aids inventory should be able to show frequency usage of each resource
on a weekly basis. It must be emphasized that teaching and learning materials are
determinant of quality of education, thus it is essential for quality teaching materials to
be made available to teachers and students in adequate quantity to support teaching
and learning processes.
Teaching Skills
Reigner(2000)&Berry,B.(2011) reiterates that teachers needs to be
curious,imaginative,interesting,friendly and hard working in order to be effective in
the classroom, thereby creating a learning environment that results in enhancing
learners disposition. Interesting teachers keep students alive, attentive and focused based to hear and learn more from classroom instruction.
The nature of effective teaching skills is that the teacher should renew and
innovate, and enlighten the minds of students so that linkage can be established
between past, present and build positive hope by preparing them to build meaningful
knowledge for correct application.
An effective teacher realize that students learn in a diverse ways hence, a
skilled teacher should adjust lessons to reach all students, responding to multiples of
learning in classroom in addition to usage of remediation and enhancement,
responding to students need and getting students actively engaged in the lesson will
increase rate of retention and reproduction .Therefore, effective teaching skills are
essential to successful school outcomes resulting from instructional supervision by
vice principals.
Researches and experiences had revealed that teachers’ actions in their
classroom especially teaching skills have twice impact on students’ achievement as do
school policies regarding curriculum, assessment, staff collegiality and community
involvement Marzano (2003).
Challenges
1. The vice principal knowledge on the new instructional practices gained from
attending conferences, seminars and training of external supervisors may be
limiting.
2. Overburden of vice principals with some administrative duties of conducting
examination, carrying out special duties as it is mandatory for vice principals to
carry out instructions from the principals as his role is that of assistants.
4. There may not be absolute authority given to vice principals to back-up the
academic responsibility in order to deal with erring teachers and ensure realization
of goals and objectives of teaching.
5. There may be possibility of clash of interest of power between principals to
absolutely hand over academic tasks to vice principals with power and authority as
some teachers might play themselves in-between the two power personality of
administering the school effectively.
6.. The vice principals’ overzealousness for absolute power and decisions regarding
instructional monitoring.
Conclusions
Teachers’ effectiveness in classroom instruction in evaluated with their
mastery of subject matter, teaching resources, teaching skills and school records have
impacts on learners’ academic achievement.
This is in agreement with Campbell,J.M.(2004) that teachers’ level of
instruction arising from instructional supervision under the office of vice principals
will ensure effectiveness resulting in improved academic achievement of students in
the secondary schools in Ogun State, Nigeria.
Recommendations and Suggestions
1.vice principals should co-opt the most senior members of staff/head of staff as
workload shared is half-solved to avoid stress and excess burdens ,this will be a
breeding ground for excellence and continuation of good value. More so that
most senior members of staff will soon be assigned vice principal-ship
position/duty –post.
2. Vice-principals should be given one or two periods per week in a lower class to
serve as good role models so that instructions will b e matched with
action/activity.
3.Training should be given to vice principals on the nature, process, roles and
limitations of academic responsibility in relation to principals(superior boss) and
external supervisors from ministry of education, teaching service commission(
regulating and supervising agencies).This can be a good avenue to deploy
experienced supervisors on ad-hoc(short) and permanent position and use vice
principals as resource-persons as those who performs such job are less ranked and
equipped with fewer experiences on instructional level of teachers.
4.Vice principals can occasionally be part of supervision or inspection team as
observer to further learn the rudiments of measuring scales and check-list for
application in their various schools to ensure effective connection between external
supervisors and teachers for effectiveness in academic activities for productiveness
towards students in secondary schools/secondary education.
5.Let there be a policy in place to deploy experienced vice principals to the
inspectorate department of the ministry of education to give required experiences
to new and inexperienced education inspectors for stability and quality
effectiveness of instructional supervision in schools.
6.There should be a policy statement for the vice principals to be given constitutional
duties in the school with authority for effectiveness of work assigned and to also
give good image to the office of vice principal.
References
Adegbile, J.A&Adeyemi, B.A (2008).Enhancing quality assurance through teachers’
effectiveness.Ile-Ife, Nigeria. AcademicJournals, Volume 3(2) pages 61-63.Assessed
on December 2013 from http://www.academicjournals.org/ERR.
Beach, D.M&Reinhartz,J.(2000).A book on supervisory leadership focusing on
instruction.Boston:Allyn and Bacon.
Bloom G.G.,Castagna,C&Warren,B. (2003).The principals and coaching requirement. Volume
10.
Berry,B.(2011).Teacherpreneurs:A more powerful vision for the teaching profession. Phi
Delta Kappan,92(6),28-33.
Campbell, J.M. (2004).Resources for professional supervision and clinical supervision. A
handbook for practioners.Authored by J.M Campbell published in 2004.
Cawood, J & Gibbon, J. (1990). Educational Leadership. Staff development. Capetown:
Nasou.University of Zululand Institutional
Repository.http://uir.unisa.ac.za/bitstream/handle/105001/1432/03 .
Federal Government of Nigeria (FGN 2006).A handbook on the federal ministry of
education.
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Minggu, 01 November 2015
Leader Emergence Through Interpersonal Neural Synchronization Jing Jiang
Jing Jiang (蒋静)a,b,c,d, Chuansheng Chen (陈传升)e, Bohan Dai (代博涵)a,b,f,g, Guang Shi (时光)a,b, Guosheng Ding (丁国盛)a,b, Li Liu (刘丽)a,b, and Chunming Lu (卢春明)a,b,1
a) State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning and IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875,
China;
b) Center for Collaboration and Innovation in Brain and Learning Sciences, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China;
c) Berlin School of Mind and Brain, Humboldt University, 10117 Berlin, Germany;
d) Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, 04103 Leipzig, Germany;
e) Department of Psychology and Social Behavior, University of California, Irvine, CA 92697;
f) Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen 6500 AH, The Netherlands; and
g) International Max Planck Research School for Language Sciences, Nijmegen 6500 AH, The Netherlands
Edited by Susan T. Fiske, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, and approved March 2, 2015 (received for review December 1, 2014)
The neural mechanism of leader emergence is not well understood. This study investigated (i) whether interpersonal neural
synchronization (INS) plays an important role in leader emergence,
and (ii) whether INS and leader emergence are associated with the
frequency or the quality of communications. Eleven three-member
groups were asked to perform a leaderless group discussion (LGD)
task, and their brain activities were recorded via functional near
infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS)-based hyperscanning. Video recordings of the discussions were coded for leadership and communication. Results showed that the INS for the leader–follower (LF)
pairs was higher than that for the follower–follower (FF) pairs in
the left temporo-parietal junction (TPJ), an area important for social mentalizing. Although communication frequency was higher
for the LF pairs than for the FF pairs, the frequency of leaderinitiated and follower-initiated communication did not differ significantly. Moreover, INS for the LF pairs was significantly higher
during leader-initiated communication than during follower-initiated
communications. In addition, INS for the LF pairs during leaderinitiated communication was significantly correlated with the
leaders’ communication skills and competence, but not their communication frequency. Finally, leadership could be successfully
predicted based on INS as well as communication frequency early
during the LGD (before half a minute into the task). In sum, this
study found that leader emergence was characterized by highlevel neural synchronization between the leader and followers
and that the quality, rather than the frequency, of communications was associated with synchronization. These results suggest
that leaders emerge because they are able to say the right things
at the right time.
leader emergence
|neural synchronization|
babble hypothesis|
quality of communication|
communication skill
L
eadership is a ubiquitous feature of all social species, including
human and nonhuman animals (1, 2). However, the neural
mechanism of leader emergence is still not well-understood.
Evolutionary theories suggest that, whereas both human and
nonhuman animals have evolved tendencies to compete for
dominance over access to survival-related resources (3–5), human leaders also play an important role in maintaining group
cohesion (6). Thus, human leaders need to take into account
not only their own needs but also the needs of their followers
to facilitate cooperation among group members (7–9). Interestingly, recent imaging evidence indicates that the neural activities
of two individuals are more synchronized when they perform
a cooperative rather than a competitive task (10). Moreover,
the level of interpersonal neural synchronization (INS) is closely
associated with the level of understanding between partners (11). It
is unknown, however, whether INS is involved in leader emergence.
Previous evidence has shown that communication plays an
important role in the increase of INS (12). However, the role
of communication in leader emergence has been extensively
debated. On the one hand, the so-called“babble”hypothesis
postulates that the most talkative member of a group often
becomes the group’s leader (13, 14). Indeed, there is evidence
that the frequency of communication (regardless of its usefulness) is a better predictor of leader emergence than other factors
such as the quality of communication (15). It is suggested that
communication frequency is probably one of the main factors
that increase the probability for initiating group action (16).
On the other hand, various recent studies have suggested that
the quality of communication is a more important predictor of
leader emergence than is the frequency of communication (17–
20). Consistent with this“quality-of-communication”hypothesis,
evidence shows that the frequency of communication has no
real effect on leader emergence (20). Although the frequency of
communication boosts leadership ratings, it does so only when
the content is of high quality (17). Furthermore, in task-oriented
groups, the quality rather than the quantity of communication is
a better predictor of leader emergence (18, 19). Research has
also suggested that high-quality communication tends to involve
a high level of mentalizing: i.e., the ability to read social situations and to alter one’s own behavior to fit in and act appropriately (21). Indeed, communication skills have been considered
to be an important part of leader competence in modern societies (22). It is likely that leaders emerge when they possess tactful
communication skills and competence: i.e., being able to say the
right things at the right time.
Research is needed to investigate how communications are
related to INS, which in turn may be related to leader emergence. Considering the interactive nature of leader emergence,
Significance
Great leaders are often great communicators. However, little is
known about the neural basis of leader–follower communication. Only recently have neuroscientists been able to examine
interpersonal neural synchronization (INS) between leaders
and followers during social interactions. Here, we show that
INS is significantly higher between leaders and followers than
between followers and followers, suggesting that leaders
emerge by synchronizing their brain activity with that of the
followers. Moreover, the quality rather than frequency of the
leaders’ communications makes a significant contribution to
theincreaseofINS.Thisresultsupportsthe“quality of communication” hypothesis in leader emergence. Finally, our results
show that leadership can be predicted shortly after the onset
of a task based on INS as well as communication behaviors.
Author contributions: J.J., C.C., G.D., L.L., and C.L. designed research; J.J., B.D., and G.S.
performed research; J.J., C.C., B.D., G.S., and C.L. analyzed data; and J.J., C.C., and C.L.
wrote the paper.
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.
1
To whom correspondence should be addressed. Email: luchunming@bnu.edu.cn.
This article contains supporting information online atwww.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.
1073/pnas.1422930112/-/DCSupplemental.
4274–4279 | PNAS | April 7, 2015 | vol. 112 | no. 14 www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1422930112
it is imperative to adopt the “second-person approach”:i.e.,
measuring two or more persons’ brain activities simultaneously
(23). This approach is also termed “hyperscanning” and has
proven to be promising in the field of social neuroscience (23–25).
By using an EEG-based hyperscanning approach, recent evidence
showed that, during guitar playing, the a priori-assigned leaders
showed higher levels of delta-phase locking than did the followers
and that INS from the leaders to the followers was stronger than
that from the followers to the leaders (26, 27). Evidence further
showed implicit synchronization of both body movements and
neural activity between a priori-assigned leaders and followers
during social interactions (28). However, previous hyperscanning
studies did not examine the neural mechanism of leader–follower
(LF) communications and did not compare the INS between the
LF and the follower–follower (FF) pairs. Thus, it is still unknown
whether and how INS is involved in leader emergence. In addition,
EEG is sensitive to motor artifacts and suffers from poor spatial
resolution. In contrast, functional near infrared spectroscopy
(fNIRS) is more tolerant of movements and is able to measure
local hemodynamic effect. These advantages make it particularly
suitable for testing the role of communication in leader emergence
in a realistic situation.
This study examined whether and how INS was involved in
leader emergence by using the fNIRS-based hyperscanning
approach. During the experiment, three-person groups were
recruited to perform a leaderless group discussion (LGD) task.
This task has been used successfully in many studies to induce
a discussion-oriented, problem-solving situation (19). INS of neural
activity was computed. It was hypothesized that INS of the LF pairs
would be higher than that of the FF pairs. Based on the babble
hypothesis, it was expected that (i) leaders would initiate more
communications than the followers and (ii) the increased INS
for the LF pairs would be mainly due to the emerging leaders’
communication frequency and would occur in language-related
brain areas. Alternatively, based on the quality-of-communication hypothesis, leaders would not initiate more communications
than the followers, and INS for the LF pairs would be associated
with the emerging leaders’ communication skills and competence, rather than the frequency, and would occur in brain areas
associated with social mentalizing. Finally, using a Fisher linear
discrimination analysis, we investigated how early during the
LGD session the INS data and communication behaviors could
predict the emergence of leaders.
Results
Interpersonal Neural Synchronization. The experimental setup is
illustrated in Fig. 1A. For each session, three participants sat
face-to-face in a triangle and were given a topic for an LGD
(see Materials and Methodsfor details). Their brain activities
were simultaneously recorded with an fNIRS system (Fig. 1B).
The discussion was video-taped and coded by independent
judges for leadership, communication skills and competence,
initiation of communications, and frequencies of verbal and
nonverbal communications.
For the LF pairs, a significant INS increase compared with
the resting-state condition was identified at channel 6 (CH6),
which roughly covered the left temporo-parietal junction (TPJ)
[t
(10) =4.62,P=0.001, false discovery rate (FDR) correction]
(Fig. 1C). No INS increase was found for any channel of the FF
pairs (Fig. 1D). Group differences between the LF and FF pairs
were significant for CH6 (t
(20)=3.51,P=0.002), but not for any
other CHs.
To validate that the above results could not have been obtained
by chance, we assessed the likelihood of obtaining significant INS increases for any random pairings of the participants.
Specifically, we reanalyzed the data after randomizing the LF
pairing both within and between discussion groups. The first was
the within-group permutation: Each of the two followers was
assigned to be the“leader”and the INS data were reanalyzed.
The second approach was the between-group permutation: All
33 participants were randomly assigned to 11 three-member
groups, and the INS analysis was then reconducted. This permutation was conducted 1,000 times. Both approaches showed
no significant INS increases for any CHs. Fig. 1EandFandG
andHshows the results of typical within- and between-group
validation analyses, respectively. Complete results for CH6 from
1,000 permutations of between-group validation analyses are
shown inFig. S1. These results suggested that the significant INS
increase in the left TPJ was specific to the particular LF relationship in the LGD context.
Who Synchronized with Whom?Granger causality analysis (GCA)
was conducted on the time series of CH6 to determine whether
it was the leader who synchronized with the followers or whether
it was the other way around. One-sample t tests on the pairwiseconditional causalities showed that the mean causalities of both
directions were significantly higher than zero: from the leaders to
the followers (t
(10)=10.001,P<0 .001="" and="" br="" followers="" from="" the="" to="">the leaders (t
(10)=7.272,P<0 .001="" br="" however="" test="" two-samplet="">showed that the mean causality from the leaders to the followers
was significantly higher than that from the followers to the
leaders (t
(10)=2.177,P=0.027). These results indicated a more
important role of the leaders than the followers in the INS increase in the LF pairs at CH6.
Communication Behaviors and INS. Both verbal and nonverbal
communication frequencies were significantly higher for the LF
pairs than for the FF pairs: (t
(20) =3.873,P=0.001) for verbal
and (t
(20)=4.565,P<0 .001="" br="" communications="" for="" ig.="" nonverbal="">2A). However, the leaders did not differ significantly from the
followers in the frequency of communication initiation (t
(10) =
−1.602,P=0.125). To investigate whether the role of leaders in
communication initiation might have changed as the discussion
progressed, the initiation data were reanalyzed by the first and
the second halves of the LGD session. Still, no differences were
found between the LF and FF pairs: (t
(10) =−0.433,P=0.674)
Fig. 1. Experimental procedure and the increase of interpersonal neural
synchronization (INS). (A) For each group, three persons sat in a triangle.
Two cameras were placed in opposite positions. The figure shows two sample
frames from the cameras in the opposite directions. Participants were asked to
discuss a topic for 5 min and then to choose a leader to report their conclusion.
(B) The optode probe set was placed on the left frontal, temporal, and parietal
cortices. T3 corresponds to a position in the international 10–20 system.
(CandD) Shown are tmaps for results of the original pairs (i.e., real data).
(EandF) Shown aretmaps for the permutation results of pairs with a follower
from the same group randomly assigned as the leader. (GandH) Shown aret
maps for the permutation results of randomized pairs from across groups. [C,E,
andGaretmaps for averaged leader–follower (LF) pairs;D,F,andHaretmaps
for the follower–follower (FF) pairs.]
Jiang et al. PNAS | April 7, 2015 | vol. 112 | no. 14 | 4275
PSYCHOLOGICAL AND
COGNITIVE SCIENCES
for the first half and (t
(10) =−0.858,P=0.411) for the second
half of the LGD session (Fig. 2B). These results suggested that,
although communication frequency was higher for the LF pairs
than for the FF pairs, leaders and followers contributed equally
throughout the LGD session.
We next examined INS that accompanied different types of
communications (verbal, nonverbal, and no communications).
For the LF pairs, INS during verbal communications (INS-V)
differed significantly from both INS during nonverbal communication (INS-NV) (t
(10) =2.951,P=0.015) and INS when no
communications occurred (INS-NC) (t
(10)=2.758,P=0.02) (Fig.
2C). Fig. 3 shows the correspondence between INS (coherence
value) and video frame for a typical LF pair at CH6. No significant results were found for the FF pairs. Group difference in
INS-V between the LF and FF pairs was also significant (t
(20) =
3.178,P=0.005). No significant group differences were found
for INS-NV (t
(20)=−0.24,P=0.813) and INS-NC (t
(20)=0.982,
P=0.338). These results indicated that the INS difference was
specific for verbal communication between the leaders and
the followers.
In terms of the role of communication initiation, leaderinitiated communications induced a higher level of INS than the
ones initiated by the followers (t
(20)=2.176,P=0.042) (Fig. 2D).
This result suggested that leader-initiated communications were
likely to be of higher quality (and thus led to increased INS).
This conjecture was further supported by two other results. First,
leaders’ communication skills and competence were more highly
rated (M=25.279, SD=0.800) than those of the followers (M=
22.020, SD=1.112) (t
(20) =7.894,P<0 .001="" 2e="" br="" ig.="" second="">there was a significant correlation between INS during leaderinitiated communications and judge-rated leaders’ communication skills and competence (r=0.697,P=0.017) (Fig. 2F). The
correlation between INS during leader-initiated communications
and the leaders’ initiation frequency was not significant (r =
0.247,P=0.465). This difference in correlation coefficients was
in favor of the quality-of-communication hypothesis over the
babble hypothesis although a larger sample of leaders would be
needed to allow for a statistical test of the difference.
Prediction of Leadership.To investigate how early the leaders
emerged during the LGD, Fisher linear discrimination analyses
were conducted. Fig. 4Ashows the time course of the prediction
accuracy in the discriminant analysis based on the INS data,
which differentiated the LF pairs from the FF pairs. The analysis
included three indexes: sensitivity (percentage of LF pairs correctly predicted, red line), specificity (percentage of FF pairs
correctly predicted, blue line), and the generalization rate of
accuracy (overall proportions of LF and FF pairs correctly predicted, green line). A moving-window analysis (window size=9s)
revealed that the prediction accuracy was sporadic during the
initial period, but the prediction accuracy of all three indexes was
stably higher than the chance level starting at 23 s (P<0 .05="" br="">corrected by FDR) [see the purple section above the chancelevel (0.50) line in Fig. 4A)]. A similar discriminant analysis was
conducted based on the communication frequency (Fig. 4B). The
results showed that the prediction accuracy of all three indexes
was stably higher than the chance level starting at 29 s (P<0 .05="" br="">corrected by FDR) (see the purple section above the chancelevel line in Fig. 4B). In sum, the INS and communication frequency data were able to discriminate the leaders from the followers less than half a minute into the LGD task.
Discussion
This study used an fNIRS-based hyperscanning approach to test
the hypothesis that INS was involved in leader emergence. The
results demonstrated that INS increased from the baseline more
significantly for the LF pairs than for the FF pairs. Further
analysis revealed that, although the communication initiation
frequency of leaders and followers did not differ significantly,
leader-initiated communication induced greater INS than did
follower-initiated communication. The INS increase during leaderinitiated communications was also associated with leaders’
communication skills and competence. These results suggest that
quality rather than quantity (or frequency) of communication is
more important in leader emergence. These results are discussed
sequentially below.
First, results of this study confirmed our hypothesis that the
LF relationship in the LGD context would be characterized by
a high level of INS. We derived our hypothesis from integrating
Fig. 2. (A) Verbal and nonverbal communication frequencies during the
task. The averaged frequency of the two leader–follower (LF) pairs (black)
was higher than the frequency of the follower–follower (FF) pairs (white).
(B) There were no significant differences in leader-initiated (L→F) vs. follower-initiated (F→L) verbal communications. (C) LF pairs’ INS during verbal
communication (INS-V) was higher than INS for all other situations. NC, no
communication occurred; NV, nonverbal communication; V, verbal communication. (D) INS during leader-initiated communication was higher than
that during follower-initiated communication. (E) Leaders’ communication
skills and competence were more highly rated than those of the followers.
(F) INS during leader-initiated communication was positively associated with
ratings of communication skills and competence (Upper), but not with
leader-initiated communication frequency (Lower). *P<0 .05.="" br="">Fig. 3. The correspondence between INS at CH6 and coded communication
behaviors. (A) A time course of INS for one randomly selected LF pair. (B)The
corresponding communication behaviors coded from video frames. Blue
points, follower-initiated verbal communications; green points, nonverbal
communications; red points, leader-initiated verbal communications. The
sections of the line without color points represent no communications. The
numbers 1, 2, and 3 inAhighlight time points that correspond to videoframe examples inB.
4276 | www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1422930112 Jiang et al.
recent imaging evidence that cooperation between persons led to
a high level of INS (10, 28) with recent perspectives about human
leaders’ role as the coordinators who help their groups to solve
various tasks, including resource sharing and decision making
(9, 29). According to the service-for-prestige theory of leadership
(9), human leaders and followers are involved in reciprocal exchange: Leaders may incur costs to provide followers with public
goods, and, in return, followers incur costs to provide leaders
with prestige, particularly in a relatively small group. We interpret
the higher INS for the LF pairs as a reflection of their closer
cooperation and social exchange.
Second, we found that the level of INS was increased specifically during verbal communications between the leaders and
followers, not during nonverbal or no communications, nor for
any type of communications involving the FF pairs. This result
was consistent with previous studies showing that verbal communication was one of the main factors that affected leader
emergence (13, 17–19). The present results further suggest that
verbal communication affects leader emergence by modulating
the neural synchronization. Because of the importance of verbal
communications in INS, this particular route of leader emergence
may be specific to humans (e.g., the service-for-prestige theory) (9).
Nonhuman animals typically establish leadership via dominance
(e.g., displays of physical strength), so it would be interesting to
investigate whether they also show INS.
Third, although the leaders and followers contributed equal
numbers of communications, leader-initiated verbal communications were found to lead to higher INS than did followerinitiated ones. Moreover, the GCA results showed that INS was
bidirectional but was significantly stronger from the leaders to
the followers than the other direction. These results suggested
that dynamic social interactions played an important role in
leader emergence. Indeed, as Schilbach et al. (23) suggested,
dynamic social interaction is a key constituent of grasping the
minds of others. An action by an“initiator”may lead to closer
monitoring of the outcome of the interaction, including the
responses by other individuals (23). In our study, the leaders initiated the communications, monitored the followers’ responses,
and closely synchronized their brain activities with those of the
followers. This speculation was further supported by the significant correlation between communication skills and competence
and INS. It seems that a leader is someone who would say the
right things at the right time to increase neural synchronization with the followers.
Fourth, the increased INS for the LF pairs was found in the
left TPJ, but not in the language area [i.e., left inferior frontal
cortex (IFC)]. This result was consistent with previous evidence
that high quality of communication is associated with high-level
mentalizing (21), which was partly subserved by the left TPJ.
Specifically, previous evidence has shown that interpersonal coordination or communication is facilitated by the mutual abilities
to predict each other’s subsequent action (i.e., high-level mentalizing) (30). Researchers have debated about which specific
parts of the left or right TPJ or both are involved in mentalizing
and understanding and reasoning about the beliefs and intentions of others (31–33). In one study, a lesion in the left TPJ was
found to affect the representations of someone else’s beliefs
(33). In another study, the posterior part of the right TPJ and the
parietal cortex were found to be involved in social cognition and
memory retrieval whereas the anterior part of the right TPJ as
well as the motor cortex and insula were involved in attention
(32). Although the poor spatial resolution of fNIRS did not allow
us to precisely locate the position of the INS increase, the most
likely area would be the posterior part of the left TPJ (for highlevel mentalizing) because no motor cortex was involved in
this study.
Finally, discriminant analyses showed that, shortly after the
start of the LGD task, the INS data and communication
behaviors could successfully distinguish the LF from the FF
pairs. These results further supported the quality-of-communication hypothesis by suggesting that the communication
frequency matters when the quality is of high level (17). These
results also confirmed previous findings (26–28, 34) that
neural activity (as well as interactive communication behaviors)
could be used to differentiate reliably the leaders from the followers. It is worth noting that different studies have found different earliest time points for successful discrimination based on
neural activity: before the onset of the interactions in Sänger
et al. (26, 27) and Konvalinka et al. (34) and about half a minute
into the interaction in our study. One possible explanation of
these variations is that the time point for successful discrimination depends on how the leaders emerge. In Sänger et al. (26,
27), leaders were assigned a priori; in Konvalinka et al. (34),
leaders emerged through a number of repeated trials; and, in the
present study, leaders emerged during a single LGD task. Future
research should specifically examine the role of neural activity or
INS in predicting different types of leader emergence.
Several limitations of this study need to be noted. First, our
findings from the LGD task may not be generalized to other
types of situations for leader emergence. The process of leader
emergence from a free discussion among equals (all college
students) may be different from one involving members who are
of different ages, genders, social status, etc. In addition, the
phenomenon of INS may also be different for leader emergence
than for situations with a leader assigned a priori, as discussed
earlier. Second, our sample size was adequate for the examination of group differences, but not as satisfactory for individual
differences in leaders. Similarly, the statistical power was limited
when we tested the babble hypothesis because of both the small
sample size and the somewhat limited verbal behaviors from the
short period of the LGD task. Third, we did not measure other
important characteristics of leadership, such as charisma (35),
which should be considered in future research for their role in
INS. Finally, because of the poor spatial resolution of fNIRS,
it was difficult to identify exactly which brain areas were responsible for the responses at CH6.
In summary, leadership is an important feature of human society, but little is known about the neural basis of leader emergence. Using the fNIRS-based hyperscanning approach in a
realistic interpersonal-communication context, the current study
found evidence that human leaders cooperated with their followers to achieve group decision by synchronizing their brain
Fig. 4. Time course of prediction accuracy. (A) Prediction results based on
the cumulative INS data. (B) Prediction results based on cumulative communication frequency. There were a total of 274 time points forAafter
shifting 6 s toward the left due to fNIRS signal delay (Materials and Methods) and 280 time points for B. The time courses were smoothed by using
a moving average method (span=9 s). The purple line above the chancelevel line indicates the time points where all three accuracy indexes were
significantly higher than the chance level (0.50).
Jiang et al. PNAS | April 7, 2015 | vol. 112 | no. 14 | 4277
PSYCHOLOGICAL AND
COGNITIVE SCIENCES
activities with those of the followers through their tactful communication skills and competence. We further found that it was
possible to predict leadership based on the INS data as well
as communication behaviors early in their interactions. These
findings contribute to the theoretical discussion about the importance of communications in leader emergence and advance our
understanding of the neural mechanism of leaderemergence. The
results also potentially may be used in neuro-feedback or neurointervention during leadership training.
Materials and Methods
Participants.Thirty-six healthy adults (mean age 22±2 y) participated in this
study. They were pseudorandomly split into 12 three-person groups. For
each group, the members had to be of the same sex (to avoid a potential
confound of intergender interactions) and were total strangers to one another. There were 6 female groups and 6 male groups. One female group
was excluded because of data collection failure.
Written informed consent was obtained from all participants. The study
protocol was approved by the Institutional Review Board of the State Key
Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning, Beijing Normal University.
Tasks and Procedures.For each group, an initial resting-state session of 5 min
served as the baseline. During this session, the participants were required to
remain as motionless as possible with their eyes closed and mind relaxed (36).
After the resting-state session, each group was instructed to perform the
LGD task. Two additional 30-s resting-state periods (one at the initial phase
and the other at the ending phase of the LGD) were used to allow the imaging instrument to reach a steady state.
During the LGD, the three participants of each group sat face-to-face in
a triangle. Two digital video cameras were placed at opposite positions so
that all three participants could be recorded (see Fig. 1Afor two sample
frames). Participants received the following topic for discussion: “An airplane crash-landed on a deserted island. Only 6 persons survived: A pregnant
woman, an inventor, a doctor, an astronaut, an ecologist, and a vagrant.
Whom do you think should be given the only one-person hot-air balloon to
leave the island?”The participants were asked to read and think about the
topic for 5 min without interacting with one another. Afterward, each
group was instructed to discuss the topic for 5 min. Each group was then
required to choose a member to report their conclusion to the experimenter.
The reporting session lasted 1 min. The whole procedure was video recorded
for subsequent coding.
Determination of the Leaders and Evaluation of Communication Skills and
Competence.After the experiment, an additional group of eight graduate
students was recruited to view the video recordings of the discussion session
and to judge who the leader was for each group. Judges were asked to use
their own criteria to make the judgment. For each group, the member with
votes from more than half of eight judges was defined as the leader. The
average vote for the leaders was 77.3±15.6%. The intraclass reliability (ICC)
among judges was 0.874 (P<0 .001="" 11="" 9="" br="" for="" groups="" judges="" of="" the="">choice of the leader agreed with the group members’ own choice (i.e., the
person who gave the report). For subsequent analyses, we used the more
objective choices by the judges.
Judges were also asked to evaluate the communication skills and competence of each group member on a 5-point scale (Table S1). There were
seven aspects of communication skills and competence (group coordination,
active participation, new perspectives, input quality, logic and analytic
ability, verbal communication, and nonverbal communication). Judges were
given explanations of the above categories and a scoring guide (seeTable
S1for details). Interjudge reliability was determined by ICC, and it was satisfactory to high (ranging from 0.773 to 0.926) for all but one item (new
perspectives, ICC=0.412). Possible reasons for the judges’ lack of consensus
on“new perspectives”might be the low frequencies of relevant behavior or
ambiguity of this construct. This item was removed from further analyses.
For the remaining items, ratings from the eight judges were averaged for
each item. The final scale of communication skills and competence included
six items with high internal consistency (Cronbach alpha=0.930).
Coding of Communication Behaviors.Two additional coders, who were not
involved in the voting of leaders and the evaluations of communication skills
and competence, coded communication behaviors. We used new coders
to avoid the leader voting’s potential contamination of behavior coding.
Communication behaviors included verbal communications, such as turntaking and interjections, and nonverbal communications, such as orofacial
movements, facial expressions, and sign gestures. Each of the 280 s during
the LGD was coded as having either verbal communication, nonverbal
communication, or no communications. If both verbal and nonverbal behaviors occurred for a given second, the dominant behavior was coded.
The frequencies of verbal and nonverbal communications were calculated
as the proportions of time (out of the 280 s) when verbal and nonverbal
communications occurred, respectively. The intercoder reliability (based on
ICC) was 0.930 for verbal communications (vs. no communications) and 0.952
for nonverbal communications (vs. no communications).
In addition, the initiator of each occurrence of verbal communication was
also coded. The frequency of initiations for each member was calculated as
the ratio of time points where a member initiated a communication over the
total number of that member’s verbal communications (ICC=0.949).
FNIRS Data Acquisition.During the experiment, the participants sat in a quiet
room. An ETG-4000 optical topography system (Hitachi Medical Company)
was used to collect imaging data from the three participants of each group
simultaneously. Three sets of the same customized optode probes were used.
The probe was placed on the left hemisphere so as to cover both the left
inferior frontal cortex (an area important for language) (37) and the temporal-parietal junction (TPJ) (an area closely associated with social mentalizing) (31, 33).
The optode probes consisted of 10 measurement channels (four emitters
and four detectors, 30 mm optode separation). CH9 was placed just at T3 in
accordance with the international 10–20 system (Fig. 1B). The probe set was
examined and adjusted to ensure consistency of the positions among the
participants of each group and across the groups.
The absorption of near-infrared light at two wavelengths (695 and 830 nm)
was measured with a sampling rate of 10 Hz. The changes in the oxyhemoglobin (HbO) and deoxy-hemoglobin (HbR) concentrations were recorded
in each channel based on the modified Beer–Lambert law. This study focused
only on the changes in the HbO concentration, which was demonstrated to
be the most sensitive indicator of changes in the regional cerebral blood
flow in fNIRS measurements (38).
Imaging-Data Analysis.
Interpersonal neural synchronization.Data collected during the resting-state and
LGD sessions were entered into the analysis. During preprocessing, data in the
initial and ending periods (30 s resting state plus 10 s LGD, respectively) were
removed, leaving 280 s of data for each session. Wavelet transform coherence
(WTC) was used to assess the cross-correlation between two fNIRS time series
generated by pairs of participants as a function of frequency and time (39).
The wavelet coherence MatLab package was used (40) [for more thorough
information, please see Grinsted et al. (40) and Chang and Glover (41)].
Briefly, three HbO time series were obtained simultaneously for each CH
from the three participants of each group. WTC was applied to each pair of
the time series to generate 2D coherence maps. According to previous
studies (10, 12), the coherence value increases when there are interactions
between persons, compared with that during the resting state. Based on the
same rationale, the average coherence value between 0.02 and 0.2 Hz was
calculated. This frequency band also excluded the high- and low-frequency
noises, such as those associated with respiration (about 0.2–0.3 Hz) and
cardiac pulsation (about 1 Hz), all of which would lead to artificial coherence. Finally, the coherence value was time-averaged.
The averaged coherence value of the resting-state session was subtracted
from that of the LGD session, and the difference was used as an index of the
INS increase between two persons. Because each group had two LF pairs and
only one FF pair, the INS increases for the two LF pairs were averaged for
matched-samplet tests (SI TextandFig. S2). For each channel, after converting the INS increase into azvalue, a one-samplettest was performed on
thezvalue across the participant pairs, and twotmaps of the INS increase
(P<0 .05="" and="" br="" by="" corrected="" fdr="" for="" generated="" lf="" one="" pairs="" the="" were="">other for the FF pairs. Thetmaps were smoothed using the spline method.
Validation by randomizing the data.To verify that the INS increase was specific to
the LF relationship that emerged during the LGD, two validation approaches
were applied. The first was the within-group permutation: Each of the two
followers was assigned to be the“leader,”and the INS data were reanalyzed.
The second approach was the between-group permutation: All 33 participants were randomly assigned to 11 three-member groups, and the INS
analysis was then reconducted. This permutation was conducted 1,000 times.
Who synchronized with whom?For CHs that showed significant INS increases,
GCA was conducted to determine the direction of synchronization (i.e.,
whether it was the leaders who synchronized with the followers or the other
way around). GCA is a method that uses vector autoregressive models to
measure the causal relationship (i.e., pairwise-conditional causalities from the
4278 | www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1422930112 Jiang et al.
source to the target) between time series such as the fNIRS data (42). We
computed the pairwise-conditional causalities of both directions: from the
leaders to the followers and from the followers to the leaders. These two
causality indices were statistically tested to see whether they differed from
zero and from each other.
Communication Behaviors and INS.To confirm the contribution of communication to the INS increase during the LGD, the CHs that showed significantly
greater INS increases for the LF pairs than for the FF pairs were selected. First,
the time courses of INS in the selected CHs were downsampled to 1 Hz to
obtain point-to-frame correspondence between the signal’s time course and
video recordings. Second, the time points of the video were marked as
having either verbal or nonverbal or no communications. Third, the corresponding INSs were separately averaged to obtain three indexes: i.e., INS-V,
INS-NV, and INS-NC, for INS during verbal, nonverbal, and no communications, respectively. The INS data were adjusted for the delay-to-peak effect
in the fNIRS signal (about 6 s) (43). Finally, these indexes were statistically
compared for the LF and FF pairs separately (using a paired two-samplet
test), as well as between the LF and FF pairs (using an independent twosamplettest).
To examine the role of the leaders, further analyses were conducted
to clarify whether the results were driven by leader-initiated or followerinitiated communications and whether the increase of INS was associated
with the leaders’ communication skills and competence or communication
frequency. The results were threshholded atP<0 .05="" br="" corrected="" level="">Prediction of Leadership.The time course of INS for the LF and FF pairs during
the LGD session was baseline-corrected by subtracting their respective averaged INS during the resting state. Cumulative INS across the time was
calculated and then used as the neural-classification feature to classify the LF
and FF pairs: i.e., the type of relationship (i.e., LF or FL) was the classification
label. The cumulative INS at time pointnwas computed as a sum of the INS at
time points from 1 to n−1. The discriminant analysis was conducted for
each time point. A leave-one-out cross-validation method was used to obtain the prediction accuracy. Time courses were generated for three indexes
of prediction accuracy: sensitivity, specificity, and the generalization rate of
accuracy. Because the fNIRS signal needs 6 s to reach a peak value after the
presentation of a stimulus (43), the recorded time points did not match the
brain-activity time points (or behavioral time points, such as communications). To adjust for the delay, we deleted the first 6 time points, yielding
a total of 274 time points for INS. Then, a moving window of 9 s was used to
identify the time points when the prediction accuracy differed significantly
from a chance level (0.50). Similar analyses were conducted based on the communication frequency at each time point. Finally, a moving average method
(span =9 s) was used to smooth the time courses of prediction accuracy.
The prediction results based on moment-to-moment INS data and communication frequency are provided inFig. S3, which suggested that the cumulative data provided more stable prediction accuracy than the moment-tomoment data.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.This work was supported by National Natural Science
Foundation of China (31270023), National Key Basic Research Program of
China (973 Program, 2012CB720704), National Natural Science Foundation
of China (30900393), Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (2013YB24), the Beijing Higher Education Young Elite Teacher Project, and
the Open Research Fund of the State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience
and Learning.
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Jiang et al. PNAS | April 7, 2015 | vol. 112 | no. 14 | 4279
a) State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning and IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875,
China;
b) Center for Collaboration and Innovation in Brain and Learning Sciences, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China;
c) Berlin School of Mind and Brain, Humboldt University, 10117 Berlin, Germany;
d) Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, 04103 Leipzig, Germany;
e) Department of Psychology and Social Behavior, University of California, Irvine, CA 92697;
f) Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen 6500 AH, The Netherlands; and
g) International Max Planck Research School for Language Sciences, Nijmegen 6500 AH, The Netherlands
Edited by Susan T. Fiske, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, and approved March 2, 2015 (received for review December 1, 2014)
The neural mechanism of leader emergence is not well understood. This study investigated (i) whether interpersonal neural
synchronization (INS) plays an important role in leader emergence,
and (ii) whether INS and leader emergence are associated with the
frequency or the quality of communications. Eleven three-member
groups were asked to perform a leaderless group discussion (LGD)
task, and their brain activities were recorded via functional near
infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS)-based hyperscanning. Video recordings of the discussions were coded for leadership and communication. Results showed that the INS for the leader–follower (LF)
pairs was higher than that for the follower–follower (FF) pairs in
the left temporo-parietal junction (TPJ), an area important for social mentalizing. Although communication frequency was higher
for the LF pairs than for the FF pairs, the frequency of leaderinitiated and follower-initiated communication did not differ significantly. Moreover, INS for the LF pairs was significantly higher
during leader-initiated communication than during follower-initiated
communications. In addition, INS for the LF pairs during leaderinitiated communication was significantly correlated with the
leaders’ communication skills and competence, but not their communication frequency. Finally, leadership could be successfully
predicted based on INS as well as communication frequency early
during the LGD (before half a minute into the task). In sum, this
study found that leader emergence was characterized by highlevel neural synchronization between the leader and followers
and that the quality, rather than the frequency, of communications was associated with synchronization. These results suggest
that leaders emerge because they are able to say the right things
at the right time.
leader emergence
|neural synchronization|
babble hypothesis|
quality of communication|
communication skill
L
eadership is a ubiquitous feature of all social species, including
human and nonhuman animals (1, 2). However, the neural
mechanism of leader emergence is still not well-understood.
Evolutionary theories suggest that, whereas both human and
nonhuman animals have evolved tendencies to compete for
dominance over access to survival-related resources (3–5), human leaders also play an important role in maintaining group
cohesion (6). Thus, human leaders need to take into account
not only their own needs but also the needs of their followers
to facilitate cooperation among group members (7–9). Interestingly, recent imaging evidence indicates that the neural activities
of two individuals are more synchronized when they perform
a cooperative rather than a competitive task (10). Moreover,
the level of interpersonal neural synchronization (INS) is closely
associated with the level of understanding between partners (11). It
is unknown, however, whether INS is involved in leader emergence.
Previous evidence has shown that communication plays an
important role in the increase of INS (12). However, the role
of communication in leader emergence has been extensively
debated. On the one hand, the so-called“babble”hypothesis
postulates that the most talkative member of a group often
becomes the group’s leader (13, 14). Indeed, there is evidence
that the frequency of communication (regardless of its usefulness) is a better predictor of leader emergence than other factors
such as the quality of communication (15). It is suggested that
communication frequency is probably one of the main factors
that increase the probability for initiating group action (16).
On the other hand, various recent studies have suggested that
the quality of communication is a more important predictor of
leader emergence than is the frequency of communication (17–
20). Consistent with this“quality-of-communication”hypothesis,
evidence shows that the frequency of communication has no
real effect on leader emergence (20). Although the frequency of
communication boosts leadership ratings, it does so only when
the content is of high quality (17). Furthermore, in task-oriented
groups, the quality rather than the quantity of communication is
a better predictor of leader emergence (18, 19). Research has
also suggested that high-quality communication tends to involve
a high level of mentalizing: i.e., the ability to read social situations and to alter one’s own behavior to fit in and act appropriately (21). Indeed, communication skills have been considered
to be an important part of leader competence in modern societies (22). It is likely that leaders emerge when they possess tactful
communication skills and competence: i.e., being able to say the
right things at the right time.
Research is needed to investigate how communications are
related to INS, which in turn may be related to leader emergence. Considering the interactive nature of leader emergence,
Significance
Great leaders are often great communicators. However, little is
known about the neural basis of leader–follower communication. Only recently have neuroscientists been able to examine
interpersonal neural synchronization (INS) between leaders
and followers during social interactions. Here, we show that
INS is significantly higher between leaders and followers than
between followers and followers, suggesting that leaders
emerge by synchronizing their brain activity with that of the
followers. Moreover, the quality rather than frequency of the
leaders’ communications makes a significant contribution to
theincreaseofINS.Thisresultsupportsthe“quality of communication” hypothesis in leader emergence. Finally, our results
show that leadership can be predicted shortly after the onset
of a task based on INS as well as communication behaviors.
Author contributions: J.J., C.C., G.D., L.L., and C.L. designed research; J.J., B.D., and G.S.
performed research; J.J., C.C., B.D., G.S., and C.L. analyzed data; and J.J., C.C., and C.L.
wrote the paper.
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.
1
To whom correspondence should be addressed. Email: luchunming@bnu.edu.cn.
This article contains supporting information online atwww.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.
1073/pnas.1422930112/-/DCSupplemental.
4274–4279 | PNAS | April 7, 2015 | vol. 112 | no. 14 www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1422930112
it is imperative to adopt the “second-person approach”:i.e.,
measuring two or more persons’ brain activities simultaneously
(23). This approach is also termed “hyperscanning” and has
proven to be promising in the field of social neuroscience (23–25).
By using an EEG-based hyperscanning approach, recent evidence
showed that, during guitar playing, the a priori-assigned leaders
showed higher levels of delta-phase locking than did the followers
and that INS from the leaders to the followers was stronger than
that from the followers to the leaders (26, 27). Evidence further
showed implicit synchronization of both body movements and
neural activity between a priori-assigned leaders and followers
during social interactions (28). However, previous hyperscanning
studies did not examine the neural mechanism of leader–follower
(LF) communications and did not compare the INS between the
LF and the follower–follower (FF) pairs. Thus, it is still unknown
whether and how INS is involved in leader emergence. In addition,
EEG is sensitive to motor artifacts and suffers from poor spatial
resolution. In contrast, functional near infrared spectroscopy
(fNIRS) is more tolerant of movements and is able to measure
local hemodynamic effect. These advantages make it particularly
suitable for testing the role of communication in leader emergence
in a realistic situation.
This study examined whether and how INS was involved in
leader emergence by using the fNIRS-based hyperscanning
approach. During the experiment, three-person groups were
recruited to perform a leaderless group discussion (LGD) task.
This task has been used successfully in many studies to induce
a discussion-oriented, problem-solving situation (19). INS of neural
activity was computed. It was hypothesized that INS of the LF pairs
would be higher than that of the FF pairs. Based on the babble
hypothesis, it was expected that (i) leaders would initiate more
communications than the followers and (ii) the increased INS
for the LF pairs would be mainly due to the emerging leaders’
communication frequency and would occur in language-related
brain areas. Alternatively, based on the quality-of-communication hypothesis, leaders would not initiate more communications
than the followers, and INS for the LF pairs would be associated
with the emerging leaders’ communication skills and competence, rather than the frequency, and would occur in brain areas
associated with social mentalizing. Finally, using a Fisher linear
discrimination analysis, we investigated how early during the
LGD session the INS data and communication behaviors could
predict the emergence of leaders.
Results
Interpersonal Neural Synchronization. The experimental setup is
illustrated in Fig. 1A. For each session, three participants sat
face-to-face in a triangle and were given a topic for an LGD
(see Materials and Methodsfor details). Their brain activities
were simultaneously recorded with an fNIRS system (Fig. 1B).
The discussion was video-taped and coded by independent
judges for leadership, communication skills and competence,
initiation of communications, and frequencies of verbal and
nonverbal communications.
For the LF pairs, a significant INS increase compared with
the resting-state condition was identified at channel 6 (CH6),
which roughly covered the left temporo-parietal junction (TPJ)
[t
(10) =4.62,P=0.001, false discovery rate (FDR) correction]
(Fig. 1C). No INS increase was found for any channel of the FF
pairs (Fig. 1D). Group differences between the LF and FF pairs
were significant for CH6 (t
(20)=3.51,P=0.002), but not for any
other CHs.
To validate that the above results could not have been obtained
by chance, we assessed the likelihood of obtaining significant INS increases for any random pairings of the participants.
Specifically, we reanalyzed the data after randomizing the LF
pairing both within and between discussion groups. The first was
the within-group permutation: Each of the two followers was
assigned to be the“leader”and the INS data were reanalyzed.
The second approach was the between-group permutation: All
33 participants were randomly assigned to 11 three-member
groups, and the INS analysis was then reconducted. This permutation was conducted 1,000 times. Both approaches showed
no significant INS increases for any CHs. Fig. 1EandFandG
andHshows the results of typical within- and between-group
validation analyses, respectively. Complete results for CH6 from
1,000 permutations of between-group validation analyses are
shown inFig. S1. These results suggested that the significant INS
increase in the left TPJ was specific to the particular LF relationship in the LGD context.
Who Synchronized with Whom?Granger causality analysis (GCA)
was conducted on the time series of CH6 to determine whether
it was the leader who synchronized with the followers or whether
it was the other way around. One-sample t tests on the pairwiseconditional causalities showed that the mean causalities of both
directions were significantly higher than zero: from the leaders to
the followers (t
(10)=10.001,P<0 .001="" and="" br="" followers="" from="" the="" to="">the leaders (t
(10)=7.272,P<0 .001="" br="" however="" test="" two-samplet="">showed that the mean causality from the leaders to the followers
was significantly higher than that from the followers to the
leaders (t
(10)=2.177,P=0.027). These results indicated a more
important role of the leaders than the followers in the INS increase in the LF pairs at CH6.
Communication Behaviors and INS. Both verbal and nonverbal
communication frequencies were significantly higher for the LF
pairs than for the FF pairs: (t
(20) =3.873,P=0.001) for verbal
and (t
(20)=4.565,P<0 .001="" br="" communications="" for="" ig.="" nonverbal="">2A). However, the leaders did not differ significantly from the
followers in the frequency of communication initiation (t
(10) =
−1.602,P=0.125). To investigate whether the role of leaders in
communication initiation might have changed as the discussion
progressed, the initiation data were reanalyzed by the first and
the second halves of the LGD session. Still, no differences were
found between the LF and FF pairs: (t
(10) =−0.433,P=0.674)
Fig. 1. Experimental procedure and the increase of interpersonal neural
synchronization (INS). (A) For each group, three persons sat in a triangle.
Two cameras were placed in opposite positions. The figure shows two sample
frames from the cameras in the opposite directions. Participants were asked to
discuss a topic for 5 min and then to choose a leader to report their conclusion.
(B) The optode probe set was placed on the left frontal, temporal, and parietal
cortices. T3 corresponds to a position in the international 10–20 system.
(CandD) Shown are tmaps for results of the original pairs (i.e., real data).
(EandF) Shown aretmaps for the permutation results of pairs with a follower
from the same group randomly assigned as the leader. (GandH) Shown aret
maps for the permutation results of randomized pairs from across groups. [C,E,
andGaretmaps for averaged leader–follower (LF) pairs;D,F,andHaretmaps
for the follower–follower (FF) pairs.]
Jiang et al. PNAS | April 7, 2015 | vol. 112 | no. 14 | 4275
PSYCHOLOGICAL AND
COGNITIVE SCIENCES
for the first half and (t
(10) =−0.858,P=0.411) for the second
half of the LGD session (Fig. 2B). These results suggested that,
although communication frequency was higher for the LF pairs
than for the FF pairs, leaders and followers contributed equally
throughout the LGD session.
We next examined INS that accompanied different types of
communications (verbal, nonverbal, and no communications).
For the LF pairs, INS during verbal communications (INS-V)
differed significantly from both INS during nonverbal communication (INS-NV) (t
(10) =2.951,P=0.015) and INS when no
communications occurred (INS-NC) (t
(10)=2.758,P=0.02) (Fig.
2C). Fig. 3 shows the correspondence between INS (coherence
value) and video frame for a typical LF pair at CH6. No significant results were found for the FF pairs. Group difference in
INS-V between the LF and FF pairs was also significant (t
(20) =
3.178,P=0.005). No significant group differences were found
for INS-NV (t
(20)=−0.24,P=0.813) and INS-NC (t
(20)=0.982,
P=0.338). These results indicated that the INS difference was
specific for verbal communication between the leaders and
the followers.
In terms of the role of communication initiation, leaderinitiated communications induced a higher level of INS than the
ones initiated by the followers (t
(20)=2.176,P=0.042) (Fig. 2D).
This result suggested that leader-initiated communications were
likely to be of higher quality (and thus led to increased INS).
This conjecture was further supported by two other results. First,
leaders’ communication skills and competence were more highly
rated (M=25.279, SD=0.800) than those of the followers (M=
22.020, SD=1.112) (t
(20) =7.894,P<0 .001="" 2e="" br="" ig.="" second="">there was a significant correlation between INS during leaderinitiated communications and judge-rated leaders’ communication skills and competence (r=0.697,P=0.017) (Fig. 2F). The
correlation between INS during leader-initiated communications
and the leaders’ initiation frequency was not significant (r =
0.247,P=0.465). This difference in correlation coefficients was
in favor of the quality-of-communication hypothesis over the
babble hypothesis although a larger sample of leaders would be
needed to allow for a statistical test of the difference.
Prediction of Leadership.To investigate how early the leaders
emerged during the LGD, Fisher linear discrimination analyses
were conducted. Fig. 4Ashows the time course of the prediction
accuracy in the discriminant analysis based on the INS data,
which differentiated the LF pairs from the FF pairs. The analysis
included three indexes: sensitivity (percentage of LF pairs correctly predicted, red line), specificity (percentage of FF pairs
correctly predicted, blue line), and the generalization rate of
accuracy (overall proportions of LF and FF pairs correctly predicted, green line). A moving-window analysis (window size=9s)
revealed that the prediction accuracy was sporadic during the
initial period, but the prediction accuracy of all three indexes was
stably higher than the chance level starting at 23 s (P<0 .05="" br="">corrected by FDR) [see the purple section above the chancelevel (0.50) line in Fig. 4A)]. A similar discriminant analysis was
conducted based on the communication frequency (Fig. 4B). The
results showed that the prediction accuracy of all three indexes
was stably higher than the chance level starting at 29 s (P<0 .05="" br="">corrected by FDR) (see the purple section above the chancelevel line in Fig. 4B). In sum, the INS and communication frequency data were able to discriminate the leaders from the followers less than half a minute into the LGD task.
Discussion
This study used an fNIRS-based hyperscanning approach to test
the hypothesis that INS was involved in leader emergence. The
results demonstrated that INS increased from the baseline more
significantly for the LF pairs than for the FF pairs. Further
analysis revealed that, although the communication initiation
frequency of leaders and followers did not differ significantly,
leader-initiated communication induced greater INS than did
follower-initiated communication. The INS increase during leaderinitiated communications was also associated with leaders’
communication skills and competence. These results suggest that
quality rather than quantity (or frequency) of communication is
more important in leader emergence. These results are discussed
sequentially below.
First, results of this study confirmed our hypothesis that the
LF relationship in the LGD context would be characterized by
a high level of INS. We derived our hypothesis from integrating
Fig. 2. (A) Verbal and nonverbal communication frequencies during the
task. The averaged frequency of the two leader–follower (LF) pairs (black)
was higher than the frequency of the follower–follower (FF) pairs (white).
(B) There were no significant differences in leader-initiated (L→F) vs. follower-initiated (F→L) verbal communications. (C) LF pairs’ INS during verbal
communication (INS-V) was higher than INS for all other situations. NC, no
communication occurred; NV, nonverbal communication; V, verbal communication. (D) INS during leader-initiated communication was higher than
that during follower-initiated communication. (E) Leaders’ communication
skills and competence were more highly rated than those of the followers.
(F) INS during leader-initiated communication was positively associated with
ratings of communication skills and competence (Upper), but not with
leader-initiated communication frequency (Lower). *P<0 .05.="" br="">Fig. 3. The correspondence between INS at CH6 and coded communication
behaviors. (A) A time course of INS for one randomly selected LF pair. (B)The
corresponding communication behaviors coded from video frames. Blue
points, follower-initiated verbal communications; green points, nonverbal
communications; red points, leader-initiated verbal communications. The
sections of the line without color points represent no communications. The
numbers 1, 2, and 3 inAhighlight time points that correspond to videoframe examples inB.
4276 | www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1422930112 Jiang et al.
recent imaging evidence that cooperation between persons led to
a high level of INS (10, 28) with recent perspectives about human
leaders’ role as the coordinators who help their groups to solve
various tasks, including resource sharing and decision making
(9, 29). According to the service-for-prestige theory of leadership
(9), human leaders and followers are involved in reciprocal exchange: Leaders may incur costs to provide followers with public
goods, and, in return, followers incur costs to provide leaders
with prestige, particularly in a relatively small group. We interpret
the higher INS for the LF pairs as a reflection of their closer
cooperation and social exchange.
Second, we found that the level of INS was increased specifically during verbal communications between the leaders and
followers, not during nonverbal or no communications, nor for
any type of communications involving the FF pairs. This result
was consistent with previous studies showing that verbal communication was one of the main factors that affected leader
emergence (13, 17–19). The present results further suggest that
verbal communication affects leader emergence by modulating
the neural synchronization. Because of the importance of verbal
communications in INS, this particular route of leader emergence
may be specific to humans (e.g., the service-for-prestige theory) (9).
Nonhuman animals typically establish leadership via dominance
(e.g., displays of physical strength), so it would be interesting to
investigate whether they also show INS.
Third, although the leaders and followers contributed equal
numbers of communications, leader-initiated verbal communications were found to lead to higher INS than did followerinitiated ones. Moreover, the GCA results showed that INS was
bidirectional but was significantly stronger from the leaders to
the followers than the other direction. These results suggested
that dynamic social interactions played an important role in
leader emergence. Indeed, as Schilbach et al. (23) suggested,
dynamic social interaction is a key constituent of grasping the
minds of others. An action by an“initiator”may lead to closer
monitoring of the outcome of the interaction, including the
responses by other individuals (23). In our study, the leaders initiated the communications, monitored the followers’ responses,
and closely synchronized their brain activities with those of the
followers. This speculation was further supported by the significant correlation between communication skills and competence
and INS. It seems that a leader is someone who would say the
right things at the right time to increase neural synchronization with the followers.
Fourth, the increased INS for the LF pairs was found in the
left TPJ, but not in the language area [i.e., left inferior frontal
cortex (IFC)]. This result was consistent with previous evidence
that high quality of communication is associated with high-level
mentalizing (21), which was partly subserved by the left TPJ.
Specifically, previous evidence has shown that interpersonal coordination or communication is facilitated by the mutual abilities
to predict each other’s subsequent action (i.e., high-level mentalizing) (30). Researchers have debated about which specific
parts of the left or right TPJ or both are involved in mentalizing
and understanding and reasoning about the beliefs and intentions of others (31–33). In one study, a lesion in the left TPJ was
found to affect the representations of someone else’s beliefs
(33). In another study, the posterior part of the right TPJ and the
parietal cortex were found to be involved in social cognition and
memory retrieval whereas the anterior part of the right TPJ as
well as the motor cortex and insula were involved in attention
(32). Although the poor spatial resolution of fNIRS did not allow
us to precisely locate the position of the INS increase, the most
likely area would be the posterior part of the left TPJ (for highlevel mentalizing) because no motor cortex was involved in
this study.
Finally, discriminant analyses showed that, shortly after the
start of the LGD task, the INS data and communication
behaviors could successfully distinguish the LF from the FF
pairs. These results further supported the quality-of-communication hypothesis by suggesting that the communication
frequency matters when the quality is of high level (17). These
results also confirmed previous findings (26–28, 34) that
neural activity (as well as interactive communication behaviors)
could be used to differentiate reliably the leaders from the followers. It is worth noting that different studies have found different earliest time points for successful discrimination based on
neural activity: before the onset of the interactions in Sänger
et al. (26, 27) and Konvalinka et al. (34) and about half a minute
into the interaction in our study. One possible explanation of
these variations is that the time point for successful discrimination depends on how the leaders emerge. In Sänger et al. (26,
27), leaders were assigned a priori; in Konvalinka et al. (34),
leaders emerged through a number of repeated trials; and, in the
present study, leaders emerged during a single LGD task. Future
research should specifically examine the role of neural activity or
INS in predicting different types of leader emergence.
Several limitations of this study need to be noted. First, our
findings from the LGD task may not be generalized to other
types of situations for leader emergence. The process of leader
emergence from a free discussion among equals (all college
students) may be different from one involving members who are
of different ages, genders, social status, etc. In addition, the
phenomenon of INS may also be different for leader emergence
than for situations with a leader assigned a priori, as discussed
earlier. Second, our sample size was adequate for the examination of group differences, but not as satisfactory for individual
differences in leaders. Similarly, the statistical power was limited
when we tested the babble hypothesis because of both the small
sample size and the somewhat limited verbal behaviors from the
short period of the LGD task. Third, we did not measure other
important characteristics of leadership, such as charisma (35),
which should be considered in future research for their role in
INS. Finally, because of the poor spatial resolution of fNIRS,
it was difficult to identify exactly which brain areas were responsible for the responses at CH6.
In summary, leadership is an important feature of human society, but little is known about the neural basis of leader emergence. Using the fNIRS-based hyperscanning approach in a
realistic interpersonal-communication context, the current study
found evidence that human leaders cooperated with their followers to achieve group decision by synchronizing their brain
Fig. 4. Time course of prediction accuracy. (A) Prediction results based on
the cumulative INS data. (B) Prediction results based on cumulative communication frequency. There were a total of 274 time points forAafter
shifting 6 s toward the left due to fNIRS signal delay (Materials and Methods) and 280 time points for B. The time courses were smoothed by using
a moving average method (span=9 s). The purple line above the chancelevel line indicates the time points where all three accuracy indexes were
significantly higher than the chance level (0.50).
Jiang et al. PNAS | April 7, 2015 | vol. 112 | no. 14 | 4277
PSYCHOLOGICAL AND
COGNITIVE SCIENCES
activities with those of the followers through their tactful communication skills and competence. We further found that it was
possible to predict leadership based on the INS data as well
as communication behaviors early in their interactions. These
findings contribute to the theoretical discussion about the importance of communications in leader emergence and advance our
understanding of the neural mechanism of leaderemergence. The
results also potentially may be used in neuro-feedback or neurointervention during leadership training.
Materials and Methods
Participants.Thirty-six healthy adults (mean age 22±2 y) participated in this
study. They were pseudorandomly split into 12 three-person groups. For
each group, the members had to be of the same sex (to avoid a potential
confound of intergender interactions) and were total strangers to one another. There were 6 female groups and 6 male groups. One female group
was excluded because of data collection failure.
Written informed consent was obtained from all participants. The study
protocol was approved by the Institutional Review Board of the State Key
Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning, Beijing Normal University.
Tasks and Procedures.For each group, an initial resting-state session of 5 min
served as the baseline. During this session, the participants were required to
remain as motionless as possible with their eyes closed and mind relaxed (36).
After the resting-state session, each group was instructed to perform the
LGD task. Two additional 30-s resting-state periods (one at the initial phase
and the other at the ending phase of the LGD) were used to allow the imaging instrument to reach a steady state.
During the LGD, the three participants of each group sat face-to-face in
a triangle. Two digital video cameras were placed at opposite positions so
that all three participants could be recorded (see Fig. 1Afor two sample
frames). Participants received the following topic for discussion: “An airplane crash-landed on a deserted island. Only 6 persons survived: A pregnant
woman, an inventor, a doctor, an astronaut, an ecologist, and a vagrant.
Whom do you think should be given the only one-person hot-air balloon to
leave the island?”The participants were asked to read and think about the
topic for 5 min without interacting with one another. Afterward, each
group was instructed to discuss the topic for 5 min. Each group was then
required to choose a member to report their conclusion to the experimenter.
The reporting session lasted 1 min. The whole procedure was video recorded
for subsequent coding.
Determination of the Leaders and Evaluation of Communication Skills and
Competence.After the experiment, an additional group of eight graduate
students was recruited to view the video recordings of the discussion session
and to judge who the leader was for each group. Judges were asked to use
their own criteria to make the judgment. For each group, the member with
votes from more than half of eight judges was defined as the leader. The
average vote for the leaders was 77.3±15.6%. The intraclass reliability (ICC)
among judges was 0.874 (P<0 .001="" 11="" 9="" br="" for="" groups="" judges="" of="" the="">choice of the leader agreed with the group members’ own choice (i.e., the
person who gave the report). For subsequent analyses, we used the more
objective choices by the judges.
Judges were also asked to evaluate the communication skills and competence of each group member on a 5-point scale (Table S1). There were
seven aspects of communication skills and competence (group coordination,
active participation, new perspectives, input quality, logic and analytic
ability, verbal communication, and nonverbal communication). Judges were
given explanations of the above categories and a scoring guide (seeTable
S1for details). Interjudge reliability was determined by ICC, and it was satisfactory to high (ranging from 0.773 to 0.926) for all but one item (new
perspectives, ICC=0.412). Possible reasons for the judges’ lack of consensus
on“new perspectives”might be the low frequencies of relevant behavior or
ambiguity of this construct. This item was removed from further analyses.
For the remaining items, ratings from the eight judges were averaged for
each item. The final scale of communication skills and competence included
six items with high internal consistency (Cronbach alpha=0.930).
Coding of Communication Behaviors.Two additional coders, who were not
involved in the voting of leaders and the evaluations of communication skills
and competence, coded communication behaviors. We used new coders
to avoid the leader voting’s potential contamination of behavior coding.
Communication behaviors included verbal communications, such as turntaking and interjections, and nonverbal communications, such as orofacial
movements, facial expressions, and sign gestures. Each of the 280 s during
the LGD was coded as having either verbal communication, nonverbal
communication, or no communications. If both verbal and nonverbal behaviors occurred for a given second, the dominant behavior was coded.
The frequencies of verbal and nonverbal communications were calculated
as the proportions of time (out of the 280 s) when verbal and nonverbal
communications occurred, respectively. The intercoder reliability (based on
ICC) was 0.930 for verbal communications (vs. no communications) and 0.952
for nonverbal communications (vs. no communications).
In addition, the initiator of each occurrence of verbal communication was
also coded. The frequency of initiations for each member was calculated as
the ratio of time points where a member initiated a communication over the
total number of that member’s verbal communications (ICC=0.949).
FNIRS Data Acquisition.During the experiment, the participants sat in a quiet
room. An ETG-4000 optical topography system (Hitachi Medical Company)
was used to collect imaging data from the three participants of each group
simultaneously. Three sets of the same customized optode probes were used.
The probe was placed on the left hemisphere so as to cover both the left
inferior frontal cortex (an area important for language) (37) and the temporal-parietal junction (TPJ) (an area closely associated with social mentalizing) (31, 33).
The optode probes consisted of 10 measurement channels (four emitters
and four detectors, 30 mm optode separation). CH9 was placed just at T3 in
accordance with the international 10–20 system (Fig. 1B). The probe set was
examined and adjusted to ensure consistency of the positions among the
participants of each group and across the groups.
The absorption of near-infrared light at two wavelengths (695 and 830 nm)
was measured with a sampling rate of 10 Hz. The changes in the oxyhemoglobin (HbO) and deoxy-hemoglobin (HbR) concentrations were recorded
in each channel based on the modified Beer–Lambert law. This study focused
only on the changes in the HbO concentration, which was demonstrated to
be the most sensitive indicator of changes in the regional cerebral blood
flow in fNIRS measurements (38).
Imaging-Data Analysis.
Interpersonal neural synchronization.Data collected during the resting-state and
LGD sessions were entered into the analysis. During preprocessing, data in the
initial and ending periods (30 s resting state plus 10 s LGD, respectively) were
removed, leaving 280 s of data for each session. Wavelet transform coherence
(WTC) was used to assess the cross-correlation between two fNIRS time series
generated by pairs of participants as a function of frequency and time (39).
The wavelet coherence MatLab package was used (40) [for more thorough
information, please see Grinsted et al. (40) and Chang and Glover (41)].
Briefly, three HbO time series were obtained simultaneously for each CH
from the three participants of each group. WTC was applied to each pair of
the time series to generate 2D coherence maps. According to previous
studies (10, 12), the coherence value increases when there are interactions
between persons, compared with that during the resting state. Based on the
same rationale, the average coherence value between 0.02 and 0.2 Hz was
calculated. This frequency band also excluded the high- and low-frequency
noises, such as those associated with respiration (about 0.2–0.3 Hz) and
cardiac pulsation (about 1 Hz), all of which would lead to artificial coherence. Finally, the coherence value was time-averaged.
The averaged coherence value of the resting-state session was subtracted
from that of the LGD session, and the difference was used as an index of the
INS increase between two persons. Because each group had two LF pairs and
only one FF pair, the INS increases for the two LF pairs were averaged for
matched-samplet tests (SI TextandFig. S2). For each channel, after converting the INS increase into azvalue, a one-samplettest was performed on
thezvalue across the participant pairs, and twotmaps of the INS increase
(P<0 .05="" and="" br="" by="" corrected="" fdr="" for="" generated="" lf="" one="" pairs="" the="" were="">other for the FF pairs. Thetmaps were smoothed using the spline method.
Validation by randomizing the data.To verify that the INS increase was specific to
the LF relationship that emerged during the LGD, two validation approaches
were applied. The first was the within-group permutation: Each of the two
followers was assigned to be the“leader,”and the INS data were reanalyzed.
The second approach was the between-group permutation: All 33 participants were randomly assigned to 11 three-member groups, and the INS
analysis was then reconducted. This permutation was conducted 1,000 times.
Who synchronized with whom?For CHs that showed significant INS increases,
GCA was conducted to determine the direction of synchronization (i.e.,
whether it was the leaders who synchronized with the followers or the other
way around). GCA is a method that uses vector autoregressive models to
measure the causal relationship (i.e., pairwise-conditional causalities from the
4278 | www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1422930112 Jiang et al.
source to the target) between time series such as the fNIRS data (42). We
computed the pairwise-conditional causalities of both directions: from the
leaders to the followers and from the followers to the leaders. These two
causality indices were statistically tested to see whether they differed from
zero and from each other.
Communication Behaviors and INS.To confirm the contribution of communication to the INS increase during the LGD, the CHs that showed significantly
greater INS increases for the LF pairs than for the FF pairs were selected. First,
the time courses of INS in the selected CHs were downsampled to 1 Hz to
obtain point-to-frame correspondence between the signal’s time course and
video recordings. Second, the time points of the video were marked as
having either verbal or nonverbal or no communications. Third, the corresponding INSs were separately averaged to obtain three indexes: i.e., INS-V,
INS-NV, and INS-NC, for INS during verbal, nonverbal, and no communications, respectively. The INS data were adjusted for the delay-to-peak effect
in the fNIRS signal (about 6 s) (43). Finally, these indexes were statistically
compared for the LF and FF pairs separately (using a paired two-samplet
test), as well as between the LF and FF pairs (using an independent twosamplettest).
To examine the role of the leaders, further analyses were conducted
to clarify whether the results were driven by leader-initiated or followerinitiated communications and whether the increase of INS was associated
with the leaders’ communication skills and competence or communication
frequency. The results were threshholded atP<0 .05="" br="" corrected="" level="">Prediction of Leadership.The time course of INS for the LF and FF pairs during
the LGD session was baseline-corrected by subtracting their respective averaged INS during the resting state. Cumulative INS across the time was
calculated and then used as the neural-classification feature to classify the LF
and FF pairs: i.e., the type of relationship (i.e., LF or FL) was the classification
label. The cumulative INS at time pointnwas computed as a sum of the INS at
time points from 1 to n−1. The discriminant analysis was conducted for
each time point. A leave-one-out cross-validation method was used to obtain the prediction accuracy. Time courses were generated for three indexes
of prediction accuracy: sensitivity, specificity, and the generalization rate of
accuracy. Because the fNIRS signal needs 6 s to reach a peak value after the
presentation of a stimulus (43), the recorded time points did not match the
brain-activity time points (or behavioral time points, such as communications). To adjust for the delay, we deleted the first 6 time points, yielding
a total of 274 time points for INS. Then, a moving window of 9 s was used to
identify the time points when the prediction accuracy differed significantly
from a chance level (0.50). Similar analyses were conducted based on the communication frequency at each time point. Finally, a moving average method
(span =9 s) was used to smooth the time courses of prediction accuracy.
The prediction results based on moment-to-moment INS data and communication frequency are provided inFig. S3, which suggested that the cumulative data provided more stable prediction accuracy than the moment-tomoment data.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.This work was supported by National Natural Science
Foundation of China (31270023), National Key Basic Research Program of
China (973 Program, 2012CB720704), National Natural Science Foundation
of China (30900393), Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (2013YB24), the Beijing Higher Education Young Elite Teacher Project, and
the Open Research Fund of the State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience
and Learning.
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