We developed collaborative extensions to 'Vlab', a web-based laboratory that supports students in conducting virtual chemistry experiments. While results from a recent study indicated that VLab promotes chemistry learning, they also revealed that there is room for improvement. We embedded VLab into a collaborative environment that implements a computer-supported collaboration script for guiding students through the stages of scientific experimentation. We describe our pedagogical approach, our collaboration script, and the collaborative learning environment which implements it. We present results from two small-scale studies and a contrasting-case analysis of how adaptive prompts, in addition to the fixed script, affected student behaviour.

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Learning from errors can be a key 21st century competence, especially for informal learning where such metacognitive skills are a prerequisite. We investigate whether, how and when web-based interactive erroneous examples promote such competence, and increase understanding of fractions and learning outcomes. Erroneous examples present students with common errors or misconceptions. Three studies were conducted with students of different grade levels. We compared the cognitive, metacognitive, conceptual, and transfer learning outcomes of three conditions: a control condition (problem solving), a condition that learned with erroneous examples without help, and a condition that learned with erroneous examples with error detection and correction support. Our results indicate significant metacognitive learning gains of erroneous examples with help for 6th-graders. They also show cognitive and conceptual learning gains for 9th and 10th-graders when additional help is provided. No effects were found for 7th-graders. We discuss the implications of our findings for instructional design. D. Tsovaltzi et al.