Effects of communication competence and social network centralities on learner performance

Collaborative learning has become a dominant learning apparatus for higher level learning objectives. Much of the psychological and social mechanisms operating under this complex group activity, however, is not yet well understood. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of college students' communication competence and degree centralities of their social networks on learning outcomes in a collaborative learning situation. The study participants were 63 students of educational technology at a women's university in Korea. Path analyses of the data using NetMiner 3.4 and AMOS 7.0 indicated that: 1) communication competence caused trust network degree centrality (β = .24, p = .13), 2) communication competence caused knowledge sharing network degree centrality (β = .46, p = .00), 3) trust network degree centrality enhanced knowledge sharing network degree centrality (β = .41, p = .00), and 4) knowledge sharing network degree centrality affected individual students' learning outcomes (β = .55, p = .00). The study results revealed the significant collective effects of network degree centrality measures and individual communication competence on learners' performance. Based on these results, implications for team organization strategy and future research directions are discussed.