Facilitating Collaborative Knowledge Building

Teacher support in computer-supported lab work: bridging the gap between lab experiments and students’ conceptual understanding

“…By analysing student-teacher interactions, Mercer (2004) identified the following central functions of communicative teacher intervention: elicitation of students' understanding, contextualisation and re-framing of students' verbal accounts, and conceptual re-phrasing of students' utterances through the application of more scientific terms. Other studies have shown positive effects on students' development of conceptual understanding when the teacher provides indirect intervention, for instance by prompting metacognitive questions or encouraging students to retrieve sciencebased information instead of providing descriptive explanations or prompting fact-based student responses (Hakkarainen et al 2002;Hmelo-Silver and Barrows 2008).…”

Guest Editors' Introduction: Special Issue on Analyzing Interactions in PBL—Where to Go From Here?

“…Evensen, Salisbury-Glennon, and Glenn's (2001) qualitative study further opened this black box by adopting a situated action research case study to investigate how six first-year medical students' self-regulated their learning in their first semester of a PBL curriculum. September 2016 | Volume 10 | Issue 2 Hmelo-Silver and Barrows's (2006Barrows's ( , 2008 video analyses of facilitation in situ has since become seminal in illustrating how facilitators work within the PBL learning process. Further qualitative studies using, in many cases, recordings of PBL tutorial interactions have sought to gain an emic view of constructive, self-directed, and collaborative learning processes across a PBL cycle (Yew & Schmidt, 2009, 2012, facilitation strategies (Aarnio, Lindblom-Ylänne, Nieminen, & Pyörälä, 2014), group dynamics (Imafuku, Kataoka, Mayahara, Suzuki, & Saiki, 2014), knowledge-building processes with technologies (Bridges, 2015;Savin-Baden et al, 2011), and silence in interaction (Jin, 2012;Remedios, Clarke, & Hawthorne, 2008).…”

The Effects of a Collaborative Problem-based Learning Experience on Students’ Motivation in Engineering Capstone Courses

“…Models of PBL facilitation and mentoring suggest a range of important strategies for facilitators, including overall goals and strategies to support student learning (HmeloSilver & Barrows, 2006), specific types of questions and statements (Hmelo-Silver & Barrows, 2008), and the use of role-modeling to support cross-disciplinary PBL work (Fruchter & Lewis, 2001. The findings in the present study extend these strategies by highlighting the ways that course instructors and technical advisors need to communicate effectively with the student groups to negotiate an approach to facilitating projects that both empowers students to work with a high level of self-direction and provides enough guidance to support their perceptions that they can be successful.…”