Interaction between tool and talk: how instruction and tools support consensus building in collaborative inquiry‐learning environments

Abstract

The process of collaborative inquiry learning requires maintaining a mutual understanding of the task, along with reaching consensus on strategies, plans and domain knowledge. In this study, we explore how different supportive measures affect students' consensus-building process, based on a re-analysis of data from four studies. We distinguish between scaffolds that aim at supporting students' collaborative processes and scaffolds that aim primarily at supporting the inquiry learning process. The overall picture that emerges from the reanalysis is that integration-oriented consensus-building activities are facilitated by scaffolds that provide explicit instruction in rules for effective collaboration and by scaffolds that encourage students to collaboratively construct a representation. Scaffolds that display interindividual differences between students' opinions resulted primarily in quick consensusbuilding activities.jca_302 252..267

Scaffolding: Definition, Current Debates, and Future Directions

“…In the Collaborative Concept Mapping tool, high school physics students collaboratively create concept maps to describe a problem (Gijlers et al, 2009 ) . Students using the tool attempted to integrate their ideas with those of groupmates more than students who used a tool that had preformed hypotheses (Gijlers et al, 2009 ) .…”

Computer-Based Scaffolding Strategy

“…Thus, all of its prompts included specific content related to the problem that students were addressing-microevolution among ground finches in the Galapagos Islands. As an example of a generic scaffold, the Collaborative Concept Mapping Tool was designed to facilitate groups' shared creation of concept maps in conjunction with units of different topics (Gijlers, Saab, Van Joolingen, de Jong, & Van Hout-Wolters, 2009). …”

Serious support for serious gaming: enhancing knowledge acquisition in a game for prevocational mathematics education

“…Explanation in collaborative settings has been shown to foster knowledge acquisition (Gijlers, Saab, van Joolingen, de Jong, & van Hout-Wolters, 2009). And when collaboration is implemented in heterogeneous groups, students not only benefit from the effect of their explanations to others, fostering the creation of more explicit knowledge structures that aid generalization, but less able students also benefit from an adaptive source of support, receiving information when needed (Webb, 1982(Webb, , 1984.…”

“…This is based on the assumptions that collaboration can lessen frustration and stimulate engagement (Davidson & Kroll, 1991;Whicker, et al, 1997) and that students who collaborate are more prone to externalize their knowledge, which in turn stimulates the formation of more explicit knowledge structures and deeper understanding of the material (Gijlers, et al, 2009;Webb, 1982).…”