Hannie Gijlers

Collaborative drawing on a shared digital canvas in elementary science education: The effects of script and task awareness support

Creating shared representations can foster knowledge acquisition by elementary school students by promoting active integration and translation of new information. In this study, we investigate to what extent awareness support and scripting facilitate knowledge construction and discourse quality of elementary school students (n = 94) in a computer-supported collaborative drawing scenario. Students in the awareness condition received feedback prompts based on the characteristics of their drawing. The script foresaw a sequence of creating, comparing, discussing, and merging individual drawings to arrive at a shared representation of the subject matter, which was photosynthesis. Both forms of support, (awareness and scripting) facilitated the learning processes and outcomes. Discourse analysis revealed that awareness and scripting increased (the share of) integrative and conflict-oriented consensus-building activities as well as (the share of) off-task and coordination-related activities in comparison to the control group. Awareness and scripting facilitated deeper understanding of the processes and relations of domain concepts. The scripted students acquired significantly more conceptual knowledge than the unscripted students.

Drawing-Based Simulation for Primary School Science Education: An Experimental Study of the GearSketch Learning Environment

Touch screen computers are rapidly becoming available to millions of students. These devices make the implementation of drawing-based simulation environments like Gear Sketch possible. This study shows that primary school students who received simulation-based support in a drawing-based learning environment performed better than students who did not receive this support. Furthermore, the students who received this support did better on both direct and delayed posttests. These findings indicate that touch screen devices can be effectively used with drawing-based simulation environments to improve drawing-based primary school science education.

Towards the convergence of CSCL and inquiry learning: scripting collaborative inquiry learning

The use of the collaboration technology must be highly structured, with a systematic didactic approach, continuing teacher involvement and periodic face-to-face meetings to troubleshoot problems and reflect on the learning process. These suggestions [...] should only surprise people - if there still are any - who think that putting a computer box in a classroom will promote learning by itself.

Storytelling as a Creative Activity in the Classroom

In our ongoing research, we argue that storytelling activities can be used as creative tasks to stimulate creativity in children, one of the so-called 21st century skills. In this paper, we lay the foundations for our project on digitally supported storytelling, by gathering the viewpoints on storytelling and creativity expressed by local primary school teachers and reviewing methods reported in the literature. We report the main characteristics and features to consider in creative storytelling activities, and present our current work on a distributed storytelling interface for supporting childrens creative skills development that meets the practical requirements found in the literature and expressed by the teachers.

Inquiry learning for gifted children

The aim of the study was to investigate the effects of support on knowledge acquisition of gifted learners and their flow and mood during inquiry learning. Sixty-four gifted primary school children were randomly assigned to one of three conditions differing in support given in an inquiry task. Results showed that learners who were allowed to experiment themselves learned more, experienced more flow, and felt more positive toward the task than those who were not given this opportunity, but only when they were guided through the inquiry cycle by prompts to generate hypotheses, perform experiments, and draw conclusions. The overall conclusion is that gifted children benefit more from open, complex tasks when their learning process is externally regulated.

Collaborative diagramming during problem based learning in medical education: Do computerized diagrams support basic science knowledge construction?

Abstract Aim: To examine how collaborative diagramming affects discussion and knowledge construction when learning complex basic science topics in medical education, including its effectiveness in the reformulation phase of problem-based learning. Methods: Opinions and perceptions of students (n = 70) and tutors (n = 4) who used collaborative diagramming in tutorial groups were collected with a questionnaire and focus group discussions. A framework derived from the analysis of discourse in computer-supported collaborative leaning was used to construct the questionnaire. Video observations were used during the focus group discussions. Results: Both students and tutors felt that collaborative diagramming positively affected discussion and knowledge construction. Students particularly appreciated that diagrams helped them to structure knowledge, to develop an overview of topics, and stimulated them to find relationships between topics. Tutors emphasized that diagramming increased interaction and enhanced the focus and detail of the discussion. Favourable conditions were the following: working with a shared whiteboard, using a diagram format that facilitated distribution, and applying half filled-in diagrams for non-content expert tutors and\or for heterogeneous groups with low achieving students. Conclusion: The empirical findings in this study support the findings of earlier more descriptive studies that diagramming in a collaborative setting is valuable for learning complex knowledge in medicine.

The influence of prior knowledge on experiment design guidance in a science inquiry context

ABSTRACT Designing and conducting sound and informative experiments is an important aspect of inquiry learning. Students, however, often design experiments that do not allow them to reach conclusions. Considering the difficulties students experience with the process of designing experiments, additional guidance in the form of an Experiment Design Tool (EDT) was developed, together with reflection questions. In this study, 147 pre-university students worked in an online inquiry learning environment on buoyancy and Archimedes’ principle. Students were randomly assigned to one of three conditions, each of which contained a different version of the EDT. Since students’ prior knowledge has been found to influence the amount and type of guidance they need, the versions of the tool differed with respect to the level of guidance provided. A pre- and post-test were administered to assess students’ conceptual knowledge. No overall differences between conditions were found. In a subsequent analysis, students were classified as either low, low-intermediate-, high-intermediate, or high prior knowledge students. For Archimedes’ principle we found that low-intermediate prior knowledge students gained significantly more conceptual knowledge than low prior knowledge students in the fully guided condition. It is hypothesised that students need at least some prior knowledge in order to fully benefit from the guidance offered.

Drawing-Based modeling for early science education

Creating models is at the heart of any scientific endeavor and therefore should have a place in science curricula. We present three approaches, a collaborative drawing tool to support scientific dialogue, a domain specific tool providing intelligent support for learning about gear systems as well as a freehand drawing tool to support learner created animation.

Examining the relation between domain-related communication and collaborative inquiry learning

Research has suggested that providing elaborated explanations is often more beneficial for learning than receiving explanations (e.g., Webb, 1989). Applied to chat communication in a collaborate inquiry learning environment, we would expect that in a dyad the learner with more domain-related contributions than his partner would learn more. In the paper we develop a method to examine the relation between domain-related chats and learning outcome for intuitive knowledge. We describe how we automatically extract domain-related messages, and score them based on the expected cognitive effort to produce the messages. The analysis confirms that there is a positive relation between a high score on domain-related chats and the learning improvement as measured by the difference between a post-test and a pre-test on intuitive knowledge.