Scaffolding cyber-enabled collaborative learning in engineering courses and its impacts of on students' learning process and outcomes

Abstract

More engineering faculty and students have realized the importance of the collaborative learning and utilized it to facilitate engineering learning. However, students may not carry out collaborative learning effectively without some instructional support because they may have litter knowledge on how to effectively exchange ideas and share learning, particularly for those who have lower achieving and may benefit more through interactions with their learning peers. Besides, students may have difficulty to find a common time slot suitable for collaborative leaning in a traditional face-to-face manner. This paper is to introduce findings from available cognitive research on supporting effective collaborative learning and present a new instructional framework for scaffolding collaborative learning for engineering students through cyber-enabled online discussion. Within this framework, students are assigned with 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 discussion. The scaffolding from both social and cognitive perspectives is presented to students to provide a structure of effective collaborative knowledge construction by specifying, sequencing, and assigning roles or activities to students, and providing prompts for them to ask thought-provoking questions. The implementation outcomes indicated that the presented instructional framework provides a platform for students to engage in intellectual exchange with their team peers for co-constructing their knowledge and impacting their understandings of engineering concepts and learning dispositions. The limitations of current findings and suggestions for future implementation are discussed. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2014.