Designing Online Tools for Collaborative Knowledge Integration

Collaborative discussions can significantly contribute to learners’ knowledge acquisition; however, research has shown that K-12 students will add ideas without integrating them into their existing schemas and often adopt unsubstantiated claims as their own. In this design study, we explored how differential scaffolds can support middle school students’ discussions as they develop integrated understandings longitudinally within an online evolutionary science unit. Students studied the unit individually but also collaborated to discuss instances in the unit where dilemmas were presented, where they were prompted to add ideas to a public idea market (IM). Two conditions were compared: a Guided condition, where students (n = 181) were scaffolded to distinguish their ideas from their peers’, and a Typical condition, where students (n = 163) responded to their peers’ ideas without scaffolding. The peer-to-peer interaction data within the IM were analyzed for patterns of collaboration among students in each condition and any resulting changes in the sophistication of their explanations across the Knowledge Integration framework. The data support that students in the Guided condition, compared to the Typical condition, provided significantly more integrated responses related to their capability to distinguish their ideas from their peers across all dilemmas: t (335) = 6.63, p < 0.01; Cohen’s d = 0.73. However, differences in condition did not impact overall student learning gains. Implications are discussed related to the value of technologically enhanced collaborative discussions and the role of scaffolds within the designs of these platforms.