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…

Research on simulator training has rarely focused on the way simulated contexts are constructed collaboratively. This study sheds light on how structuring role-play and fostering social interactions may prove fruitful for designing simulator training. The article reports on a qualitative study of nautical students training in a ship simulator. The…

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…

In this paper we examine how two groups of middle school students arrive at shared understandings of and solutions to mathematical problems. Our data consists of logs of student participation in the Virtual Math Teams (VMT) system as they work on math problems. The project supports interaction both through chat and through a virtual whiteboard. We…

Earlier quantitative studies in computer-supported collaborative learning identified "Productive Failure" (Kapur, Cognition and Instruction 26(3):379-424, "2008") as a phenomenon in which students experiencing relative failures in their initial problem-solving efforts subsequently performed better than others who were in a condition not involving…

Research on knowledge cultivation often focuses on explicit forms of knowledge. However, knowledge can also take a tacit form--a form that is often difficult or impossible to tease out, even when it is considered critical in an educational context. A review of the literature revealed that few studies have examined tacit knowledge issues in online…

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 seeks to contribute new insight to the process of learning during idea generation (i.e., brainstorming) by proposing and evaluating two alternative operationalizations for learning, which we refer to as connection-based learning and multi-perspective learning, during a carefully designed idea-generation task in the earth-sciences…

The purpose of this article is to gain knowledge about how interactions in a gaming context become constituted as effective resources for a student's learning trajectory. In addition, this detailed study of a learning trajectory documents how a computer game becomes a learning resource for working on a specific topic in school. The article reports…

This paper illustrates the experience gained within an online course, where a collaborative technique, namely Role Play, was used within an asynchronous text-based environment to trigger collaboration and interactions among students. In a pilot study, the technique was analyzed using an evaluation model and two different means: on the one hand,…

This paper aims to better understand the development of students' metacognitive learning processes when participating actively in a CSCL system called KnowCat. To this end, a longitudinal case study was designed, in which 18 university students took part in a 12-month (two semesters) learning project. The students followed an instructional…

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…