Papers in PDF format

Collaborative Design: A Cognitive Approach To Information Resources
Alex Cuthbert
Education In Math, Science, & Technology (EMST)
University of California, Berkeley; Berkeley, CA 94720-1670 USA
Email: alx@violet.berkeley.edu http://www.kie.berkeley.edu
These studies address two questions: (a) Does an activity structure that encourages iterative refinement help
expand the problem definition of open-ended design tasks involving Internet resources? and (b) What types of
online resources help students locate information on the Internet? By addressing these questions using the
Scaffolded Knowledge Integration (SKI) framework [Linn 1995], this research provides suggestions for
improving the design of tools that facilitate knowledge construction and integration in online environments.
These studies extend research in the areas of collaborative design, pragmatics and communication, category
and concept representation, environmental science education, and information retrieval. The activities took
place within the Knowledge Integration Environment (KIE), a computer-based learning environment
combining on-line tools such as a student notebook, a multimedia discussion forum (SpeakEasy), and ondemand
cognitive and procedural guidance.
In the first study (N=131), eighth graders searched the World Wide Web for information relevant to a design
task involving the storage of heat and the regulation of temperature. The activity consisted of surveying
selected Internet sites related to energy conservation and environmentally-sensitive housing design, searching
the Internet for evidence to support original designs, and formulating a final report integrating drawings of a
desert house with principled evidence for design decisions. The majority of the students were successful at
searching, locating, and incorporating Internet evidence into the design process. The degree of principled
reasoning behind the design decisions varied considerably and did not correlate with the success of the search
activity.
In a second experiment (N=132), a collaborative search page was added where sites selected by students were
automatically added to a publicly-accessible and searchable Web form. Log files were generated to track
student activity patterns, queries, and comments about Internet sites. The new activity design was successful in
expanding the students' definition of the problem as measured by the range of features considered. The
publicly-accessible and searchable Web form containing student-located sites helped scaffold those students
that had difficulty locating Internet material on their own. Extending earlier work in the area of information
resources and design tasks [Cuthbert 1996], this research suggests that the mechanisms that help students
critically analyze marginally relevant data and develop cogent, principled arguments are tied to the ability to
conceptualize the problem as opposed to the ability to generate queries to narrow the search space.
Methodology
The eighth graders involved in this study had taken a semester of science using the Computer As A Learning
Partner (CLP) curriculum. Students were allowed to select their partners for the activity. The activity called
"Desert Houses" was an end-of-term project designed to allow independent work linking principles about
insulation and conduction that were discussed throughout the semester. The participants worked in pairs on
Macintosh LC II computers using Netscape, Microsoft Works, and the KIE environment . During the activity,
the participants examined actual Internet sites, prepared sites, and excerpts from labs completed earlier in the
semester (e.g., a "heat bars" lab that measured the conductivity of various materials). They searched for
relevant Internet sites by generating keywords as a class and then entering words into a form that fed into a
search engine (i.e., http://www.excite.com). In the first experiment, students had access to an on-line
thesaurus. In the second experiment, they had access to sites located by other students through a searchable
Web form. In the second experiment, the activity checklist included: initial design, survey evidence,
synthesize evidence, online discussion, search episode, heat flow analysis, redesign, and final report. Clinical
interviews with six students provided an in-depth look at the conceptual understanding behind the designs.