Collaboration scripts and heuristic worked examples have been described as powerful scaffolds to support skill acquisition in CSCL. While CSCL scripts particularly facilitate argumentative discourse within groups, heuristic worked examples provide heuristics and worked out pathways to solve domain-specific tasks. Yet, both scripts and heuristic…

Cognitive group awareness tools are a means to guide collaborative learning activities by providing knowledge-related information to the learners. While positive effects of such tools are firmly established, there is no consistency with regard to the awareness information used and a wide range of target concepts exist. However, attempts to compare…

Conversational agents that draw on the framework of academically productive talk (APT) have been lately shown to be effective in helping learners sustain productive forms of peer dialogue in diverse learning settings. Yet, literature suggests that more research is required on how learners respond to and benefit from such flexible agents in order…

This article reports a theory-driven experimental study that evaluates the effects of an annotation functionality on online social interaction and individual learning outcomes. The central hypothesis of this study is that directly addressing a part of a text by annotating it and then connecting each annotation with its related discussion can…

The links uncovered by research connecting teacher beliefs to classroom practice and student inquiry-based learning are tenuous. This study aims at examining (a) "how" teacher beliefs influenced practices; and (b) "how" the influence on practices, in turn, impacted student inquiry learning in a CSCL environment. Through a fine-grained comparative…

While some studies found positive effects of collaboration on student learning in mathematics, others found none or even negative effects. This study evaluates whether the varying impact of collaboration can be explained by differences in the type of knowledge that is promoted by the instruction. If the instructional material requires students to…

This paper presents a methodology designed to explore the role of context in collaborative knowledge construction activity in asynchronous web-based discussion. The discussions of two student groups participating in a web-based teacher education course were compared. The comparison aimed to highlight the differences and similarities between the…