Abstract
Our study examined middle grade students’ participation in wikis during their two-month social studies unit co-taught by two teachers as part of a larger action research project. Using an analysis of 42 grades 5 and 6 students working together in eight wiki writing groups, we report on the frequency and types of revisions they made to collaboratively-written essays, and the distribution of the workload across group members in each of the wiki groups. Discussion data with 16 students from these wiki groups helps contextualize our analysis.Our findings suggest that given their extended time to write, students revised frequently, making replacements more often than they deleted, added or moved content. Students indicated a willingness to change others’ contributions and to have their own contributions revised by others in order to improve the quality of the essays. The majority of their revisions were at the word level, rather than at sentence, paragraph, and whole-text levels. One student in each group contributed significantly more frequently than any other group member. There were no gender or grade patterns in the frequencies or types of contributions that students made to the wikis.
Highlights
Our findings suggest that given their extended time to write, students revised frequently, making replacements more often than they deleted, added or moved content
We include some of the responses from our meetings and discussions with the students where they shared their thinking about collaborative writing on a wiki and what they learned through the process
Revisions made to the collaboratively-written research essays were more likely to be at the word and phrase levels than at the more substantive sentence and paragraph levels
Summary
Our findings suggest that given their extended time to write, students revised frequently, making replacements more often than they deleted, added or moved content. Students indicated a willingness to change others’ contributions and to have their own contributions revised by others in order to improve the quality of the essays. A web application that creates an online environment for collaborative creation, revision and editing of content is called a wiki. Wikis have served as a collaborative writing environment for elementary students responding to a question about the possibility of a human colony being established on Mars (Pifarré & Fisher, 2011), and by middle-grade ELL students to create an information brochure for parents about their new school (Mak & Coniam, 2008). We think that wikis offer more potential for online collaboration and substantive revision of writing than has been realized in the research
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