Collaborative discovery in a scientific domain

A better understanding of the nature of consultations between professionals engaging in the collaborative process of solving complex problems — expertise in use — offers the potential to reshape our ideas about how to design computer systems that can engage in collaborative problem solving with their human cohorts. The research reported here has sought to account for key behaviors contributing to successful consultation, as identified by a cognitive task assessment of human-human consultation discourse in the medical teaching rounds setting. W e have come to view the communication acts of the presenter/investigator as evidence of his deliberate intention to indirectly construct a particular model of the patient's case — his model — in the expert's mind, resulting in two separate but related diagnostic tasks for the expert: one at the patient level and one at the presenter/investigator level. This dual-diagnostic theory of expert understanding of the presenter/investigator's communication actions is partially implemented in the RUMINATE program. The theory provides insights into the expert's capacity to model aspects of the presenter/investigator's competence — insights that contribute to our understanding of expertise embedded in the context of collaborative problem solving discourse

Inquiry activities in a classroom: extra-logical processes of illumination vs logical process of deductive and inductive reasoning. A case study

The paper presents results of the research, which was focused on studying students’ inquiry work from a psychological point of view. Inquiry activities of students in a classroom were analysed through the evaluation of the character of these activities within learning process with respect to mathematician’s research practice. A process of learning mathematical discovery was considered in detail as a part of inquiry activities of students in a classroom

Supporting peer interaction in online learning environments

This paper reports two studies into the efficacy of sentence openers to foster online peer-to-peer interaction. Sentence openers are pre-defined ways to start an utterance that are implemented in communication facilities as menu’s or buttons. In the first study, typical opening phrases were derived from naturally occurring online dialogues. The resulting set of sentence openers was implemented in a semi-structured chat tool that allowed students to compose messages in a freetext area or via sentence openers. In the second study, this tool was used to explore the students’ appreciation and unprompted use of sentence openers. Results indicate that students hardly used sentence openers and were skeptical of their usefulness. Because both measures were negatively correlated with students’ prior chat experience, optional use of sentence openers may not be the best way to support students’ online interaction. Based on these findings, alternative ways of using sentence openers are discussed and topics for further research are advanced

Support of the collaborative inquiry learning process: influence of support on task and team regulation

Regulation of the learning process is an important condition for efficient and effective learning. In collaborative learning, students have to regulate their collaborative activities (team regulation) next to the regulation of their own learning process focused on the task at hand (task regulation). In this study, we investigate how support of collaborative inquiry learning can influence the use of regulative activities of students. Furthermore, we explore the possible relations between task regulation, team regulation and learning results. This study involves tenth-grade students who worked in pairs in a collaborative inquiry learning environment that was based on a computer simulation, Collisions, developed in the program SimQuest. Students of the same team worked on two different computers and communicated through chat. Chat logs of students from three different conditions are compared. Students in the first condition did not receive any support at all (Control condition). In the second condition, students received an instruction in effective communication, the RIDE rules (RIDE condition). In the third condition, students were, in addition to receiving the RIDE rules instruction, supported by the Collaborative Hypothesis Tool (CHT), which helped the students with formulating hypotheses together (CHT condition). The results show that students overall used more team regulation than task regulation. In the RIDE condition and the CHT condition, students regulated their team activities most often. Moreover, in the CHT condition the regulation of team activities was positively related to the learning results. We can conclude that different measures of support can enhance the use of team regulative activities, which in turn can lead to better learning results

The relation between prior knowledge and students' collaborative discovery learning processes

In this study we investigate how prior knowledge influences knowledge development during collaborative discovery learning. Fifteen dyads of students (pre-university education, 15-16 years old) worked on a discovery learning task in the physics field of kinematics. The (face-to-face) communication between students was recorded and the interaction with the environment was logged. Based on students' individual judgments of the truth-value and testability of a series of domain-specific propositions, a detailed description of the knowledge configuration for each dyad was created before they entered the learning environment. Qualitative analyses of two dialogues illustrated that prior knowledge influences the discovery learning processes, and knowledge development in a pair of students. Assessments of student and dyad definitional (domain-specific) knowledge, generic (mathematical and graph) knowledge, and generic (discovery) skills were related to the students' dialogue in different discovery learning processes. Results show that a high level of definitional prior knowledge is positively related to the proportion of communication regarding the interpretation of results. Heterogeneity with respect to generic prior knowledge was positively related to the number of utterances made in the discovery process categories hypotheses generation and experimentation. Results of the qualitative analyses indicated that collaboration between extremely heterogeneous dyads is difficult when the high achiever is not willing to scaffold information and work in the low achiever's zone of proximal development

Knowledge integration by thinking along

knowledge, integration

Promoting effective collaboration and critical learners through ICT

El presente trabajo describe una experiencia innovadora en Educación Superior, encaminada a formar a individuos capaces de gestionar su propio aprendizaje y de buscar, seleccionar y analizar críticamente información, valorando la fiabilidad y el rigor científico de ésta. Así mismo, la experiencia implica trabajar en equipo para la consecución colaborativa de una meta común, combinando la responsabilidad personal con la colectiva y experimentando el enriquecimiento derivado de la co-evaluación y la retroalimentación constructiva. La planificación, tutela, desarrollo y evaluación de todo el proceso se apoya en el uso de las TIC

Collaboration and Gender Equity among Academic Scientists

Universities were established as hierarchical bureaucracies that reward individual attainment in evaluating success. Yet collaboration is crucial both to 21st century science and, we argue, to advancing equity for women academic scientists. We draw from research on gender equity and on collaboration in higher education, and report on data collected on one campus. Sixteen focus group meetings were held with 85 faculty members from STEM departments, separated by faculty rank and gender (i.e., assistant professor men, full professor women). Participants were asked structured questions about the role of collaboration in research, career development, and departmental decision-making. Inductive analyses of focus group data led to the development of a theoretical model in which resources, recognition, and relationships create conditions under which collaboration is likely to produce more gender equitable outcomes for STEM faculty. Ensuring women faculty have equal access to resources is central to safeguarding their success; relationships, including mutual mentoring, inclusion and collegiality, facilitate women’s careers in academia; and recognition of collaborative work bolsters women’s professional advancement. We further propose that gender equity will be stronger in STEM where resources, relationships, and recognition intersect—having multiplicative rather than additive effects

Knowledge integration by thinking along

Organizing depends on the integration of specialized knowledge that lies distributed across individuals. There are benefits from specialization, and, yet, the integration of knowledge across boundaries is critical for organizational vitality. How do organizations benefit from knowledge that lies in different domains without having to transfer knowledge? This paper describes results of two exploratory ethnographic studies of knowledge integration in industrial research organizations. It introduces a knowledge integration mechanism - ‘thinking along’ – that has not received much attention by researchers before. Thinking along is a mechanism that allows for knowledge integration without the need for transfer. As a consequence, benefits of specialization obtain even as knowledge from one domain informs knowledge from another. The paper describes how researchers use thinking along to integrate knowledge within and across boundaries. It concludes with implications for knowledge management and future research