Research Topics

AllFoundationsCSCLHow People LearnSupporting LearningMethodologiesCognitionTeaching and LearningKnowledgeLearning in Specific DisciplinesIndividual SupportCollaboration SupportAnalyzing Learning InteractionAnalyzing Outcome DataResearch Philosophies

CSCL in Times of Crisis

In a series of online events and resources for realizing CSCL in a time of crisis, we have invited CSCL practitioners and researchers to share practical approaches, practices, and tools for learning collaboratively online for building a repository of CSCL practices.

Analysis of Discourse Data

Analysis of discourse data promises insights into the processes of (computer-supported) collaborative learning on multiple levels, from individual to group level processes of thinking and learning.

Argumentation and Learning in CSCL

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Assessment

Assessments are critical components of learning environments. They provide a critical difference between knowing if, how, and what learning may occur. Assessment includes a range of topics that are also complicated to understand and implement, such as measurement, evaluation, testing, feedback, credentials, and efficacy.

Augmented Reality in the Learning Sciences

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Automated Argumentation Analysis

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Automated Collaborative Process Analysis

Automated Collaborative Process Analysis is one area within the field of Learning Analytics focused on applying computational modeling technology to process data from collaborative learning encounters.

Classroom Orchestration

Orchestration, in the widest definition, entails the design of the learning activity, the adaption and planning of the activity for a specific class, and the real-time management of that activity across multiple planes and under multiple constraints.

Cognition and Metacognition

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Cognitive Apprenticeship

Apprenticeship involves learning a physical, tangible activity. But in schooling, the “practice” of problem solving, reading comprehension, and writing is not observable to the student. Cognitive apprenticeship is a model of instruction that works to make thinking visible.

Cognitive Tutors

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Collaboration Scripts for CSCL

Collaboration scripts guide learners’ in their collaboration. The Script Theory of Guidance distinguishes between internal and external collaboration scripts. Internal collaboration scripts are composed of flexible knowledge components that help an individual to understand and engage in interaction with other people.

Communities of Learners

Communities of learners is a theoretical perspective deriving from notions of learning as a process of transformation of participation in which responsibility and autonomy are both desired. Learning is not seen as a passive process, but rather as a participation in shared sociocultural endeavors.

Complexity and the Learning Sciences

There has been increasing interest in conceptual perspectives and methods being employed in the study of complex physical and social systems to inform research in the learning sciences and education more broadly.

Conversation Analysis/Ethnomethodological Approaches

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Creating and Supporting Design Teams

Analysis of discourse data promises insights into the processes of (computer-supported) collaborative learning on multiple levels, from individual to group level processes of thinking and learning.

CSCL and Conceptual Change

How do students use language and gesture to share and improve their ideas? This topic shows how students were able build stronger concepts in physics by working together with a computer-based visualization, emphasizing the role of metaphor and qualitative relationships in their process of conceptual change.

CSCL and Disabilities

Web-based and computer supported learning environments offer accessible and inclusive opportunities for the education of students with disabilities at various education levels. However, there is, currently, a dearth of literature in the field of CSCL with respect to how to support learners with disabilities.

Data Science Education

How people work with and learn from data is an increasingly pressing topic for learning scientists, and draws on important ideas that have been examined in statistics education, mathematics education, and science education.

Design and Design-Based Research

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Design-Based Implementation Research

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Distributed Intelligence

Analysis of discourse data promises insights into the processes of (computer-supported) collaborative learning on multiple levels, from individual to group level processes of thinking and learning.

Distributed Scaffolding

Scaffolding is a metaphor for supporting learners as they learn by performing tasks that are within their zone of proximal development (ZPD) but outside their current range of independent performance. The support provides a model of ideal performance as well as augments learners’ knowledge and skills by providing prompts, feedback, or by taking over some aspects of the task.

Embodiment and Embodied Design

Learning scientists of embodied cognition by and large reject conceptualizations of knowledge as amodal cerebral content and instead seek to model knowing as it manifests dynamically in complex material and intersubjective human practice through the actual experiences of bodily structure and action, sensory processing, and mental simulations of these experiences.

Epistemic Cognition

Epistemic cognition is the study of thinking about knowledge and knowing, specifically. What do people think knowledge is? How is knowledge produced? How do decide that we or someone else knows something?

Example-Based Learning

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Foundations of the Learning Sciences

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Gestures in Learning & Teaching

Gestures are a readily available, but often overlooked, resource that can serve as a powerful tool for communicating and meaning making. Emerging technologies, from touchscreens to motion sensors, make it possible to use gestures to interact with learning content.

Group Awareness Tools

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Group Cognition

Group cognition is the theory that human thinking and learning is at root interactional. We acquire our ability to think and learn through adopting practices that arise in small-group interactions, such as in our family, work teams or circles of friends.

Information Problem Solving

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Inquiry Learning & Knowledge Integration

Research on inquiry learning and knowledge integration combines advances in theory, instructional design, and technology. To help students integrate their ideas, inquiry instruction can exploit the multiple, often conflicting ideas that students have about personal, societal, and environmental dilemmas and promote coherent arguments about economic disparity or health decision-making.

Interactional Ethnography and Problem-Based Learning

The governing principles of operation and conduct and the theoretical perspectives guiding the iterative, recursive and abductive (IRA) logic and actions that constitute Interactional Ethnography (IE) as a logic-of-inquiry are presented in these resources.

Knowledge Building

Knowledge building centers around the idea that the pursuit of knowledge is a collective endeavor, with students tasked with continually contributing, refining and building on this collective knowledge as a learning community.

Knowledge Creation

Knowledge Creation describes the construction of new knowledge in a collaborative process. It is based on the knowledge of individuals which is then combined in a synergetic way. Individuals contribute their knowledge and build on and combine the contributions of others.

Learning in the Disciplines

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Learning Progressions in Science Education

Learning progressions embody a developmental approach to learning by describing hypothetical paths that students might take as they develop progressively more sophisticated ways of reasoning about scientific concepts and practices in a domain over extended periods of time.

Learning through Problem-Solving

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Learning with Technology

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Learning-by-Design

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Multilevel Analysis

Multilevel modelling (MLM) is an alternative and adequate statistical approach in CSCL research. It enables testing interactional effects of predictor variables varying within groups (for example, the activity of group members in a chat) and predictors varying between groups (for example, the group homogeneity created by group members’ prior knowledge).

Neurocognitive Foundations for the Learning Sciences

Can neuroscience findings inform educational practice? This important question is being increasingly addressed by cognitive and developmental neuroscientists, who are investigating the complex forms of cognition of greatest interest to learning scientists, including mathematical thinking, scientific reasoning, problem solving, and language comprehension.

Quantitative Ethnography

Quantitative Ethnography is a methodology that blends qualitative and quantitative approaches into a solution for overcoming the weaknesses of traditional methods when applied to big data.

Representational Learning

Learning in formal and informal education is increasingly representationally mediated as we constantly invent new forms of representations whose form and interactive possibilities are partly due to technological development.

Shared Regulation in CSCL

Given the importance of metacognition and socially shared regulation, the design and implementation of pedagogical interventions and guidance to help learners develop socio-metacognitive expertise, the ability to understand, monitor, and regulate collaborative processes has become a very important research agenda for CSCL.

Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs)

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Situative Cognition

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Statistical Discourse Analysis

Identifying triggers of target actions within individual or social processes across time and their links to higher-level outcomes requires modeling individual (and group) characteristics and sequences of actions. One such method is statistical discourse analysis (SDA).

Teacher Learning and Technology

Emerging networked and mobile technologies provide new opportunities for the practice of teaching. They can also place new demands on teachers. Teachers must learn how to use these new technologies, acquiring fundamental ‘technology literacy’. They must also learn to productively integrate them into their existing teaching practices.