Conferencing and Teleconferencing in Three Communication Modes as a Function of the Number of Conferees.

Nine groups of 2, 3, and 4 students each, 27 groups in all, discussed stimulating topics in face-to-face conferences or in one of 2 teleconference modes teletype and televoice. Each group used one of the 3 communication modes to solve a different problem on each of 3 successive days. The problems encouraged opinionated discussion and required the group to arrive at a consensus about how their fellow students felt on these topics. Performance was assessed on a number of dependent measures time to solution number of messages exchanged by the group total number of words used by the group message length number of messages, and of words, communicated per minute etc. In general, increase in group size resulted in increase in every group measure of communication--i.e., larger groups used more messages, more words, communicated faster, and exhibited greater relative variability among the numbers of messages generated by the individuals within groups than did the smaller groups. The only exception to this generalization is that 2-man groups generated slightly longer messages than did the larger groups. Groups as a whole and individuals within group produced more messages and words in face-to-face conferences than did groups and individuals in either of the telecommunication modes. Communication rates were much higher in the 2 conference modes that had a voice channel, than in the teletype mode.