Design CSCL software to support communication and collaboration while leaving assessment of answer correctness to people¶

Strategy · All strategies
Evidence · 4 claims (3 for, 1 mixed) · 2 studies (1 qualitative, 1 theoretical), q1 · 0 of 2 report an effect size · 4 claims rest on one study

Description¶

A design strategy drawn from the Lantz-Andersson case study: in a true CSCL context, the software "would support the communication and collaboration, but would leave the assessment of the correctness of answers to people." This avoids the rigidity of simplistic testing, drilling, or tutoring software, where opaque program logic rejects responses not in a precise format and students cannot tell what requirements were set up. The strategy avoids inscrutable computer judgment of student work.

Design Implications¶

Context¶

Requirements¶

• Real people, such as teachers, must be available to judge the correctness of student responses
• Software must provide support for communication and collaboration between students

Constraints¶

• Software that rigidly tests, drills, or tutors produces inscrutable responses to partially correct answers and leads students to attribute problems to the technology rather than their own work

Target Learners¶

• Students using computer-supported learning environments

Target Learning Goals¶

• Collaborative problem solving and accurate framing of the problem context

Claims¶

• Purely peer groups working purposefully out-of-reach problems did not fully succeed but still made significant progress, internalizable by individual members [+W]
• Collaborative group failure on ill-structured physics problems confers later individual problem-solving advantages over success on well-structured problems (productive failure) [+W]
• In computer-mediated problem solving, students may attribute their problems to the technology rather than to their own work, complicating how they frame the problem context [~W]
• CSCL designers tend to leave gaps between the technical and social design of learning environments [+W]

Related Strategies¶

Examples¶

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Key Sources¶

• Gerry Stahl. (2008). Yes we can! Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11412-008-9055-3