Understanding how social and epistemic scripts perpetuate intersubjectivity through patterns of interactions

Abstract

Supporting the interactions of participants in an online learning environment is important to achieve a successful learning experience. The lack of support may cause collaborating learners to fail to complete their joint task or require too much time and effort (Rummel, N., & Spada, H. (2005). Learning to collaborate: An instructional approach to promoting collaborative problem-solving in computer-mediated settings. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 14, 201–241). It is often necessary to provide some form of scaffolding to facilitate the elaboration of collaborative learners through means of structuring their interactions. For this reason, it is important to find out what kind of support effectively perpetuates intersubjectivity and promotes richer learning by collaboration. The objective of this study was to examine how two different types of scripts influence intersubjectivity in an online problem-solving environment. The specific roles played by the participants using the social scripts helped them to develop richer iterative patterns of interaction, solve problems better, and motivate joint elaboration of learning. This finding is of great importance to educators in designing group interactions which are highly participative.