Implementation and outcomes of scaffolding cyber-enabled collaborative learning in multiple STEM courses

Abstract

Students may struggle in achieving the optimal benefit in learning from their interaction with their peers in learning STEM courses because they may be not aware of effective social interaction strategies and cognitive strategies for the collaborative learning. In addition, coping with multiple different learning tasks and schedules, students may not be able to arrange time for the face-to-face discussion with all the team members. Therefore, online discussion may become a good platform for facilitating collaborative learning. This paper presents impacts of scaffolding collaborative learning through online discussion on learning processes and outcomes of students in multiple STEM courses. Students in the same team were assigned a shared learning task and required to co-construct their understanding of the course-related learning concepts and co-solve the assigned learning problems with their peers through online discussions that were carried out via group emails. The scaffolding from both social and cognitive perspectives was presented to students to provide a structure of effective collaborative knowledge construction processes. The scaffolding focuses on specifying, sequencing, and assigning roles or activities to students, and providing prompts for them to ask thought-provoking questions and follow the right cognitive procedures specific for problems at hands. While impacts of scaffolding online discussion revealed from the data collected from two engineering courses were reported in the last year ASEE conference paper, this paper presents results of data analysis of all the valid samples in five STEM courses, yielding findings that may be generalized for STEM courses. Those results indicate that the presented instructional framework with the proposed scaffolding can provide a platform for students to engage in more collaborative learning with their team peers than they did in traditional settings. The social interaction scaffolding may promote intellectual exchange among student team members, leading to enhancing students' satisfaction on online collaborative learning, social process for collaborative learning, intrinsic value on learning, and learning performance. The limitations of current findings and suggestions for future implementation are also discussed.