Investigating How Sixth Graders Employ WeInvestigate, Designed to Support Synchronous, Collaborative Use of Multiple Tools to Promote Knowledge Building in Science

• In Event: 46.086 - Roundtable Session 16
  In Roundtable Session: 46.086-4 - Investigating WeInvestigate: The Close Study of Cyberlearning in a Sixth-Grade Science Class

Abstract

The overall purpose of this study was to investigate how collaborative learning, supported by instruction through a model-based science curriculum in the context of a tablet-based app, facilitates knowledge building and distributing expertise among pairs of sixth-grade students.
The Knowledge Building approach (e.g., Scardamalia & Bereiter, 1994) provides the predominant theoretical framing for this study. This perspective argues that distributed expertise is critical to advancing the state of knowledge of the community (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 2006). In this study, knowledge is distributed through student collaboration, as supported and evidenced by written artifacts and talk that are generated during student interactions.
The primary sources of data used in this study consisted of transcripts of three pairs of students’ audio-recorded talk as they participated in each lesson, as well as artifacts of the collaborative and independent work done by those students. Supplemental data consisted of log files, which documented the students’ actions while working in the app, and pre- and post-tests, which measured individual content knowledge. To provide some insight into the degree of collaboration, and the content of students’ talk, content analysis (e.g., Chi, 1997) was conducted on all verbal representations of knowledge (via sampled transcripts) for the three student pairs. To more deeply characterize student knowledge building, the degree to which it could be considered collaborative, and whether/how this may have been supported by the collabrified technological learning environment, a combination of interaction analysis (Jordan & Henderson, 1995) and uptake analysis (Suthers, 2006) was conducted on students’ talk in conjunction with analyzing their written artifacts, generated both independently and collaboratively.
Preliminary results illustrate the following patterns in the data.
1) When student pairs were engaged in highly transactive talk - talk that exhibited uptake of a partner’s ideas, and further contribution to those ideas (or alternative ideas offered) - they were talking primarily about science content (e.g., as opposed to coordinating tasks).
2) Talk during collaborative scientific modeling tasks for all student pairs was primarily coordinative, related to the planning and monitoring of the task.
3) Student use of the curricular text within the app seemed to support both coordinative and content-based talk.

The benefits of collaboration in schools have long been known (e.g., Brown and Campione, 1994), but at this pivotal moment in time, when the proliferation of mobile technologies in our daily lives is influencing the relatively fast integration of these technologies into classrooms, there is less known about the role of collaboration in technology-rich classrooms, particularly when at least some of the collaboration occurs through the device. Relatively little research has examined how students participate in knowledge building with technology-mediated collaboration (e.g., Kim et al., 2007). In particular, more research is needed to understand the collaborative discourse of students within a technology-facilitated science-as-practice environment, and one that also exists within naturalistic (classroom) settings (e.g., Waight & Abd-El-Khalick, 2007). This study contributes to these important areas of inquiry by providing detailed cases of pairs of diverse learners as they engage synchronously in a mobile app-based science learning environment within their traditional school classroom.

Author

• Carrie-Anne Sherwood, University of Michigan