In today's digital society, computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) and collaborative problem solving (CPS) have received increasing attention. CPS studies have often emphasized outcomes such as skill levels of CPS, whereas the action transitions in the paths to solve the problems related to these outcomes have been scarcely studied. The…

This study explores boundary-crossing interaction between two grade 5/6 science classrooms that operated as knowledge building communities. The two classrooms studied human body systems with the support of the Knowledge Forum over a ten-week period. The knowledge building practice integrated student-driven inquiry and discourse within each…

Research on Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) has provided significant insights into why collaborative learning is effective and how we can effectively provide support for it. Building on this knowledge, we can investigate when collaboration is beneficial to support learning. Specifically, collaborative and individual learning are…

Teachers and students face many challenges in shifting from traditional classroom cultures to enacting the "Knowledge-Building Communities" model (KBC model) supported by the CSCL environment, "Knowledge Forum" (Bereiter, 2002; Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1993; Scardamalia, 2002; Scardamalia & Bereiter, 2006). Enacting the…

Metacognitive scaffolding in a computer-supported learning environment can influence students' metacognitive activities, metacognitive knowledge and domain knowledge. In this study we analyze how metacognitive activities mediate the relationships between different avatar scaffolds on students' learning. Multivariate, multilevel analysis of the…

Our research aims to identify children's communicative strategies when faced with the task of solving a geometric puzzle in CSCL contexts. We investigated how to identify and trace "distributed cognition" in problem-solving interactions based on discursive cohesion to objects, participants, and prior discursive content, and geometric and…

Interactive whiteboards (IWBs) have been widely introduced to English primary schools (5-11 years) in the last decade and this has generated much research interest. In the past, research has focused on IWB-use in teacher-led sessions, attending particularly to the nature of teacher-pupil interaction at the IWB and the apparent motivational…

This field study investigated the application of cooperative, competitive, and individualistic goal structures in classroom use of computer math games and its impact on students' math performance and math learning attitudes. One hundred and sixty 5th-grade students were recruited and randomly assigned to Teams-Games-Tournament cooperative gaming,…

The purpose of this study is to refine Japanese elementary science activity structures by using a CSCL approach to transform the classroom into a knowledge-building community. We report design studies on two science lessons in two consecutive years and describe the progressive refinement of the activity structures. Through comparisons of student…

While it has been suggested that patterning activities support early algebra learning, it is widely acknowledged that the shift from perceiving patterns to understanding algebraic functions--and correspondingly, from reporting empirical patterns to providing explanations--is difficult. This paper reports on the collaborations of grade 4 students…