Abstract
Chemistry students, like students in other disciplines, often learn to solve problems by applying well-practiced procedures. Such an approach, however, may hinder conceptual understanding. We propose to promote conceptual learning by having pairs of students collaborate on problems in a virtual laboratory (VLab), assisted by a computer-mediated collaboration script that guides the students through the stages of scientific experimentation and adapts to their needs for support. We used the results from a small-scale study comparing how singles and dyads solve chemistry problems with the VLab with and without scripts to develop a scripted collaborative experimentation environment. A subsequent small-scale study compared an adaptive and a non-adaptive version of the system. Qualitative data analyses revealed a tendency for the dyads in the adaptive feedback condition to improve their collaboration and be more motivated than the non-adaptive dyads. In this paper, we present our research framework and report on preliminary results from the two small-scale studies.
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Tsovaltzi, D. et al. (2008). CoChemEx: Supporting Conceptual Chemistry Learning Via Computer-Mediated Collaboration Scripts. In: Dillenbourg, P., Specht, M. (eds) Times of Convergence. Technologies Across Learning Contexts. EC-TEL 2008. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5192. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-87605-2_49
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-87605-2_49
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