Design CSCL environments for group awareness and representational guidance to cut coordination load¶

Strategy · All strategies
Evidence · 2 claims (2 for) · 1 study (1 theoretical), q1 · 0 of 1 report an effect size · 2 claims rest on one study

Description¶

The article recommends that CSCL environments be designed to support group awareness (knowledge of how the group is functioning and how expertise is divided) and to stimulate students to explicate claims and arguments via representational guidance. It reasons this 'reduces unproductive transactive activities and, thus, their cognitive load', which in turn protects the freed working memory capacity for schema construction rather than non-learning communication.

Design Implications¶

Context¶

Requirements¶

• CSCL environment affordances that make group functioning, expertise division, and members' claims and arguments visible

Constraints¶

• In CSCL, affordances of contiguous collaboration such as deixis, body language, and facial expressions are often not available

Target Learners¶

• learners collaborating in computer-supported environments

Target Learning Goals¶

• reducing coordination costs during collaborative acquisition of domain-specific knowledge

Affordances¶

• Collaborative Cognitive Load Principles Table

Claims¶

• Communication and coordination costs of transactive activities can annul the benefit of sharing cognitive load in a group [+W]
• Unrecognised prior-knowledge asymmetry and absent prior group experience negatively affect learning in complex collaborative tasks [+W]

Related Strategies¶

• Providing Multiple Means of Representation
• Design CSCL environments to remind learners to think as a group and scaffold cognitive group awareness
• Combine process-oriented analysis with cognitive load measures to determine which transaction costs are germane or extraneous for learning
• Anchor discussion and chat facilities in CSCL firmly in the external representation, integrating diagrammatic and textual information
• Use external representations to help manage cognitive load in Computer Supported Collaborative Learning environments

Examples¶

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Key Sources¶

• Kirschner, P. A., Sweller, J., Kirschner, F., & Zambrano R., J. (2018). From Cognitive Load Theory to Collaborative Cognitive Load Theory. Intern. J. Comput.-Support. Collab. Learn. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11412-018-9277-y