While there are many studies on students' collaborative learning at the small group level, pedagogies and strategies for supporting students' collaborative learning at the class level are underexplored. This study proposes a pedagogical model named the Spiral Model of Collaborative Knowledge Improvement (SMCKI) to inform the design and…

This study reports on a novel design methodology, namely, design-centered research (DCR), developed to analyze and evaluate the alignment between an online collaborative learning design and its enactment. The approach is illustrated in a study involving 40 groups in total. Twenty different online collaborative learning activities were designed and…

The use of computational scaffolding is a crucial strategy to foster students' regulation of learning skills, which is associated with increased learning achievement. However, most interventions treat the regulatory processes as individual actions isolated from a social context. This view contradicts the most recent research that points to the…

The theory of Instrumental Genesis (IG) accounts for the mutual evolution of artefacts and their uses, for specific purposes in specific environments. IG has been used in Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) to explain how instruments are generated through the interactions of learners, teachers and artefacts in 'downstream' classroom…

There are many approaches that support studies of learning in relation to the physical environment, people's interaction with one another, or people's movement. However, what these approaches achieve in granularity of description, they tend to lose in synthesis and integration, and to date, there are not effective methods and concepts to study…

The learning sciences of today recognize the tri-dimensional nature of learning as involving cognitive, social and emotional phenomena. However, many computer-supported argumentation systems still fail in addressing the socio-emotional aspects of group reasoning, perhaps due to a lack of an integrated theoretical vision of how these three…

Role taking is an established approach for promoting social cognition. Playing a specific role within a group could lead students to exercise collective cognitive responsibility for collaborative knowledge building. Two studies explored the relationship of role taking to participation in a blended university course. Students participated in the…

Adaptive collaborative learning support systems analyze student collaboration as it occurs and provide targeted assistance to the collaborators. Too little is known about how to design adaptive support to have a positive effect on interaction and learning. We investigated this problem in a reciprocal peer tutoring scenario, where two students take…

Some recent proposals on CSCL scripts have suggested that one key factor for their effectiveness is the ability of the teacher to adapt the scripts to the students and to the specific teaching and learning situations. In this context, this paper presents a multiple-case study dealing with the relationship between the assistance given by the…

Interactive tabletops are gaining increased attention from CSCL researchers. This paper analyses the relation between this technology and teaching and learning processes. At a global level, one could argue that tabletops convey a socio-constructivist flavor: they support small teams that solve problems by exploring multiple solutions. The…

This article reviews the research and evidence about multi-touch tables to provide an analysis of their key design features and capabilities and how these might relate to their use in educational settings to support collaborative learning. A typology of design features is proposed as a synthesis of the hardware and physical characteristics of the…

This paper explores how wikis may be used to support primary education students' collaborative interaction and how such an interaction process can be characterised. The overall aim of this study is to analyse the collaborative processes of students working together in a wiki environment, in order to see how primary students can actively create a…

One of the main difficulties during the design of collaborative learning activities is adequate group formation. In any type of collaboration, group formation plays a critical role in the learners' acceptance of group activities, as well as the success of the collaborative learning process. Nevertheless, to propose both an effective and…

This article takes a renewed look at the concept of "affordance." It points out that the concept is being used within the CSCL community in ways which signify an underlying disagreement concerning the exact ontological nature and epistemological status of an "affordance." Such disagreement, it is argued, is a problem for both design and empirical…

Changing practices in schools is a very complex endeavor. This paper is about new practices we prompted to foster collaboration and critical reasoning in science classrooms: the presentation of pictures representing different perspectives, small group synchronous argumentation, and moderation of synchronous argumentation. A CSCL tool helped in…