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

Abstract

This paper reports on a study of teacher support in a setting where students engaged with computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) in science. The empirical basis is an intervention study where secondary school students and their teacher performed a lab experiment in genetics supported by a digital learning environment. The analytical focus is on student-teacher interactions taking place in help-seeking settings during group-based activities where students analysed and reported their findings from the lab experiment. A combination of quantitative methods in the form of frequency counts of students' help requests and detailed micro-analyses of student-teacher interactions are used. The findings are that the majority of challenges faced by students concerned conceptually oriented issues and procedural challenges in the sense of how to practically solve the assignments provided to them in the digital learning environment. Most importantly, the analyses of student-teacher interactions provide insight into the considerable amount of support that is needed from the teacher to bridge the conceptual gap between the lab experiment and the students' understanding of the underlying scientific principles and procedures. The findings are discussed according to possible implications for the design of digital support tools and instruction.

Multiple forms of regulation and coordination across levels in educational settings

“…In addition, the highperforming group was able to regulate and change its action as part of organizing the activities, including monitoring the process and content, while the low-performing group was more repetitive in its actions and did not change its way of organizing its work. The results from this study extend previous CSCL research in this area and provide designers and teachers with new insight into how the environment can support students' work and into the ways in which teachers may need to intervene in student groups to make sure that they engage in advanced cognitive activities (Furberg 2016).…”

Future direction for the CSCL field: Methodologies and eight controversies

“…Today, new methods are emerging, such as automatic analysis (forms of learning analytics) (Berland et al 2015) and new ways of connecting actions, conversations, and gestures that form part of participants' meaning-making processes. Interaction analysis (Jordan and Henderson 1995) has been an important methodology for many CSCL researchers over the last 20 years (Furberg 2016), which has been extended with the inclusion of gestures and the body (Davidsen and Ryberg 2017;Enyedy et al 2015). In their paper, Ben Rydal Shapiro, Rogers P. Hall, and David A. Owens extend the focus by including physical movements in their analysis.…”

Collaboration scripts and scaffolding

“…It is a nontrivial task to enhance students' communication to an academically productive level, and there have been many approaches within CSCL to address this problem. Descriptive studies have tried to identify moves and patterns that can lead to productive talk, and have developed scripts for collaborative efforts (Furberg 2016;Stegmann et al 2016;Tchounikine 2016). Recent advances in computational linguistics make it possible to tailor prompts for the students.…”

“…The paper is part of an important approach in CSCL. Based on either a socio-cultural or situated stance towards collaboration, one tries to describe and analyze how interaction and learning takes place turn by turn over time in terms of learning trajectories (Stahl et al 2014;Stahl 2015;Furberg 2016;Enyedy et al 2015). This study follows a new line of research that involves teachers as part of the activities.…”