This paper reports on a study of teacher support in a setting where students engaged with computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) in science. The empirical basis is an intervention study where secondary school students and their teacher performed a lab experiment in genetics supported by a digital learning environment. The analytical focus is on student-teacher interactions taking place in help-seeking settings during group-based activities where students analysed and reported their findings from the lab experiment. A combination of quantitative methods in the form of frequency counts of students’ help requests and detailed micro-analyses of student-teacher interactions are used. The findings are that the majority of challenges faced by students concerned conceptually oriented issues and procedural challenges in the sense of how to practically solve the assignments provided to them in the digital learning environment. Most importantly, the analyses of student-teacher interactions provide insight into the considerable amount of support that is needed from the teacher to bridge the conceptual gap between the lab experiment and the students’ understanding of the underlying scientific principles and procedures. The findings are discussed according to possible implications for the design of digital support tools and instruction.

Evaluating promisingness of ideas is an important but underdeveloped aspect of knowledge building. The goal of this research was to examine the extent to which Grade 3 students could make promisingness judgments to facilitate knowledge-building discourse. A Promising Ideas Tool was added to Knowledge Forum software to better support knowledge‐building discourse. The tool helped students select promising ideas from their group’s written online discourse and then aggregate and display selections to support collective decision making regarding most promising directions for subsequent work. Students knew in advance that their selections would influence the direction of group work, and through iterations of procedures came to better understand how individually selected ideas would become the focus of class discussions and next knowledge‐building efforts. The basic design was repeated over two cycles of promising-idea selections, discussions, and follow-up activity to refine ideas. Qualitative and quantitative results indicated that students as young as 8 years of age could make promisingness judgments benefiting their community. Through use of the Promising Ideas Tool and discussion based on results from its use, Grade 3 students achieved significantly greater knowledge advances than students not engaged in promisingness judgments and discussions.

This issue of ijCSCL completes a decade of publication of CSCL research. When the field of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning emerged about a decade prior to the launching of the journal, there was a pervasive sense of a paradigm revolution in learning research (Koschmann 1996). It was time to transcend cognitive science’s critique of behaviorism, extending the unit of cognition beyond the boundaries of the individual mind (Stahl 2015c). For instance, new directions in theory surfaced around the influential Institute for Learning Research (Brown et al., 1989; Lave & Wenger 1991; Orr 1990; Suchman 1987; Teasley & Roschelle 1993; Winograd & Flores 1986), as well as in distributed cognition (Hutchins 1996), activity theory (Engestrom 1987) and conversation analysis (Goodwin D Damsa 2014; Jones et al., 2006; Overdijk et al., 2014; Stahl 2012; 2013a). Cognitive science argued that human behavior could not be modeled without hypothesizing cognitive structures like mental representations and computations, which mediated responses to the environment, particularly linguistic responses (Chomsky 1959). However, the cognitive approach did not consider structures of interaction at the dialogical, small-group and community level, where language is primarily learned and practiced. Artificial intelligence—which exerted an important influence on CSCL—had already conceptualized cognition as taking place outside the human mind, in software computations and digital representations. The new post-cognitive theories began to postulate structures and practices at the group level, although they did not always clearly distinguish small groups from larger social institutions. Dialogical, interactional and practice-oriented approaches in CSCL have elaborated these conceptions within the context of collaborative learning (Cress & Kimmerle 2008; Ligorio et al., 2013; Oner 2013; Stahl et al., 2014). While the post-cognitive paradigm dominates CSCL theory and seems particularly appropriate to a field focused on group collaboration, it has perhaps been less influential in the areas of technology design and analysis methodology. CSCL research often relies upon technologies designed on a model of individual learning and knowledge transfer, rather than on an Intern. J. Comput.-Support. Collab. Learn (2015) 10:337–344 DOI 10.1007/s11412-015-9222-2

The four articles presented in this issue cover a broad spectrum of topics: the hierarchy of learners, different forms of awareness, group composition and classroom orchestration. The learning contexts also differ significantly, considering collaborative learning in university courses, in organizational e-learning and in vocational training. Accordingly, the student actions and interactions that the different settings aim to induce vary strongly (but return to themes in previous articles): sending and answering requests (Wise et al. 2014), building knowledge using Knowledge Forum (Zhao and Chan 2014) or creating tangible artifacts (Damsa 2014). Even though the surface structures of the four articles are quite different, they all contribute to understanding core underlying topics of CSCL: the influence of social aspects of the collaboration scenario, the type of learning that takes place in collaborative groups and the design of collaborative learning processes.

The theme of this year’s CSCL 2013 conference—“To see the world and a grain of sand: Learning across levels of space, time and scale”—targets a provocative challenge for CSCL, namely that the interactions of collaborative learning be understood, supported and analyzed at multiple levels. As the conference call puts it, “the attention to the theoretical, methodological and technological issues of addressing research at multiple levels is highly relevant to current research in CSCL, as well as to developing an emerging understanding of the epistemological and methodological issues that will shape our intellectual efforts well into the future” (http://isls.org/cscl2013). The attempt to bridge across levels of analysis—in CSCL theory, analysis and practice— stands at the forefront of CSCL research today. CSCL research typically investigates processes at the individual, small-group and community units of analysis. However, individual CSCL studies generally each focus on only one of these units. Moreover, there is little data-based analysis of how the three levels are connected, although it is clear that such connections are crucially important to understanding and orchestrating learning in CSCL settings. The introduction to the last issue of ijCSCL (Stahl 2012b) proposed that the levels of individual learning, group cognition and community knowledge building may be connected by emergent interactional resources, which can mediate between the levels.

Although learning science in informal non-school environments has shown great promise in terms of increasing interest and engagement, few studies have systematically investigated and produced evidence of improved conceptual knowledge and cognitive skills. Furthermore, little is known about how digital technologies that are increasingly being used in these informal environments can enhance learning. Through a quasi-experimental design, this study compared four conditions for learning science in a science museum using augmented reality and knowledge-building scaffolds known to be successful in formal classrooms. Results indicated that students demonstrated greater cognitive gains when scaffolds were used. Through the use of digital augmentations, the study also provided information about how such technologies impact learning in informal environments.

The purpose of this empirical study is to analyze and map the content of the International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning since its inception in 2006. Co-word analysis is the general approach that is used. In this approach, patterns of co-occurrence of pairs of items (words or phrases) identify relationships among ideas. Distances based on co-occurrence frequencies measure the strength of these relationships. Hierarchical clustering and multidimensional scaling are the two complementary exploratory methods relying on these distances that are used to analyze and map the data. Some interesting findings of the work include a map of the key topics covered in the journal and a set of complementary techniques for investigating more specific questions.

The purpose of this article is to gain knowledge about how interactions in a gaming context become constituted as effective resources for a student’s learning trajectory. In addition, this detailed study of a learning trajectory documents how a computer game becomes a learning resource for working on a specific topic in school. The article reports on a qualitative study of students at an upper secondary school who have played the computer game Global Conflicts: Palestine to learn about the complexity of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A sociocultural and dialogic approach to learning and meaning-making is employed as an analytical framework. Analyzing different interactional episodes, in which important orientations and reorientations are located, documents how the student’s learning trajectory developed and changed during the project. When engaged in game play in educational settings, experiences with playing computer games outside of school can relevantly be invoked and become part of the collaborative project of finding out how to play the game. However, these ways of engaging with a computer game might not necessarily facilitate a subtle understanding of the specific topic that is addressed in the game. The findings suggest that the constitution of a computer game as a learning resource is a collaborative project, in which multiple resources for meaning-making are in play, and for which the teacher has an important role in facilitating student’s adoption of a multiperspective on the conflict. Furthermore, the findings shed light on what characterizes student-teacher interactions that contribute to a subtle understanding, and offer a framework for important issues upon which to reflect in game-based learning (GBL).

Earlier quantitative studies in computer-supported collaborative learning identified ‘Productive Failure’ (Kapur, Cognition and Instruction 26(3):379–424, 2008) as a phenomenon in which students experiencing relative failures in their initial problem-solving efforts subsequently performed better than others who were in a condition not involving an initial failure. In this qualitative study, we examine the problem-solving dynamics of two dyads: a Productive Failure (PF) dyad who initially received a low-structured activity and a Non-Productive Failure (N-PF) dyad who initially received a high-structured activity. Both dyads then received an identical high-structured problem-solving activity. This process was repeated using multiple sets of problems, and this paper will discuss two sets. Interactions of the two dyads were logged. Data for this study included video conversations of the dyads, screen captures of their use of a computer model, and their submitted answers. Results indicated that initial struggle and failed attempts provided an opportunity to the PF dyad to expand their observation space and thus engage deeply with the computer model. Over-scripting proved to be detrimental in creation of a mutual meaning-making space for the N-PF dyad. This paper suggests that the relative success of the PF dyad might be viewed in terms of induction of reflective reasoning practices.

This paper aims to better understand the development of students’ metacognitive learning processes when participating actively in a CSCL system called KnowCat. To this end, a longitudinal case study was designed, in which 18 university students took part in a 12-month (two semesters) learning project. The students followed an instructional process, using specific features of the KnowCat design to support and improve their interaction processes, especially peer-learning processes. Our research involved both supervising the students’ collaborative learning processes throughout the learning project and focusing our analysis on the qualitative evolution of their interaction processes and of their metacognitive learning processes. The results of the current research suggest that the pedagogical use of the KnowCat system may favour and improve the development of the students’ metacognitive learning processes. In addition, the implications of the design of CSCL networks and related pedagogical issues are discussed.