Abstract
New societal demands call for schools to train students’ collaboration skills. However, research thus far has focused mainly on promoting collaboration to facilitate knowledge acquisition and has rarely provided insight into how to train students’ collaboration skills. This study demonstrates the positive effects on the quality of students’ collaboration and their knowledge acquisition of an instructional approach that consists of conventional instruction and an online tool that fosters students’ joint reflection on their collaborative behavior by employing self- and peer assessment and goal setting. Both the instruction and the collaboration reflection tool were designed to promote students’ awareness of effective collaboration characteristics (the RIDE rules) and their own collaborative behavior. First-year technical vocational students (N = 198, Mage = 17.7 years) worked in heterogeneous triads in a computer-supported collaborative learning environment (CSCL) on topics concerning electricity. They received either 1) conventional instruction about collaboration and the online collaboration reflection tool, 2) collaboration instruction only, or 3) no collaboration instruction and no tool. Analysis of chat data (n = 92) and knowledge tests (n = 87) showed that students from the instruction with tool condition outperformed the other students as far as their collaborative behavior and their domain knowledge gains.
Highlights
With the progressive embedding of technology in society, professionals in technical vocations are increasingly required to function in multidisciplinary teams and to work on complex multifaceted problems in which collaboration is essential for Extended author information available on the last page of the article successful problem-solving
The current study extends knowledge in the field of collaborative learning by investigating the effect of instructional support on students’ knowledge acquisition, and on their actual collaborative behavior, while working in a computersupported collaborative learning (CSCL) environment
To investigate whether there were differences in individual students’ communication activities between conditions, multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) was conducted, with condition as the independent variable and the communication variables (i.e., domain-related talk, coordination-related talk, off-task talk, responsive talk, positive talk, negative talk, informative talk, argumentative talk, questions asking for information, critical statements, questions asking for agreement,confirmations, and motivating talk) as dependent
Summary
With the progressive embedding of technology in society, professionals in technical vocations (e.g., car mechanics, electrical engineers) are increasingly required to function in multidisciplinary teams and to work on complex multifaceted problems in which collaboration is essential for Extended author information available on the last page of the article successful problem-solving. Such technicians are expected to be experts in their field, and efficient and effective collaborators (Christoffels and Baay 2016). “Inappropriate use of teams can undermine the educational process so badly that learning does not take place, students learn how not to learn, and students build an attitude of contempt for the learning process” (Jones 1996, p. 80)
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