Technology-Mediation and Tutoring: How Do They Shape Progressive Inquiry Discourse?

Abstract

In higher education, there is a challenge to gain the full benefit of the potentials of learning technology for collaborative knowledge advancement and for scaffolding practices of academic literacy and scientific argumentation. The technology, ideally, would be used to provide support that enables students to deal with more demanding tasks than they could otherwise handle. We investigated the benefits of learning technology by examining the role of technology-mediation and tutoring in directing students' knowledge production in inquiry-based learning. A comparative analysis of inquiry discourse was conducted for 3 conditions between nonmediated and technology-mediated inquiry processes, the latter both tutored and nontutored. Qualitative content analysis was employed to examine how the scale of scaffolding related to the nature of knowledge produced. Furthermore, a descriptive analysis of the progression of discourse was conducted to examine evidence for deepening the question-explanation process, development of ideas in dialogue, and self-reflection. The scaffolding provided by the learning technology (The Future Learning Environment), together with the possibility for dialogue, appear to have supported practices of problem-setting, self-reflection, and collaborative development of ideas. Students in the 2 technology-mediated conditions were developing their ideas in dialogue, building on each other's knowledge and questions. Tutoring was found to be valuable for providing additional models and tools for advancing inquiry. Specific to the students of the nontechnology condition (who wrote learning-logs) was that they put more effort into understanding the theoretical content, evaluating and arguing it, but they did not engage in shared development of ideas. Through a combination of the practices, the authors foresee a potential, in higher education, for development of in-depth inquiry and practices of knowledge advancement including the nurturance of epistemic agency.