Promoting reflective interactions in a computer-supported collaborative learning environment

Engaging in reflective activities in interaction, such as explaining, justifying and evaluating problem solutions, has been shown to be potentially productive for learning. Here we address the problem of how these activities may be promoted in the context of computer-mediated communication with respect to a modelling task in physics. We present the design principles of two different communication interfaces. The first allows free text to be exchanged, and the second structures the interaction by providing a restricted set of communicative acts. Comparative analyses of interaction corpora produced with the two communication interfaces are then described. The analyses show that use of the second structured interface in performing the problem-solving task is feasible for students, and that it promotes a taskfocussed and reflective interaction. In conclusion we discuss the different resources provided by different media and the relative degrees of effort that their use requires.

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