Effects of the Combination of the Factors “Collaboration Script” and “Incomplete

8.3. Effects of the Combination of the Factors “Collaboration

discourse quality. It is possible that supporting the students both with the collaboration script and incomplete concept maps for a longer time may have enabled the students to internalize the collaboration script, which in turn may have led to the facilitation of communicative and coordinative processes taking place through the unstructured chat session (Hoppe et al., 2000). At the same time, using the incomplete concept maps simultaneously may have provided a conceptual support concerning the content, which may have encouraged the students to use more web design concepts when they worked without any support. In this way, combination between both treatments may have enabled the students to engage in higher level inquiry-based discussions, learn the content deeply, and address more web design concepts. Therefore, the students in the CSICM condition may have been able to engage in higher level content-related discourse quality more than those in the ICMO condition who had learned without social scaffolding.

Furthermore, the results regarding the collaborative learning outcomes showed that the collaboration script was able to improve every dimension of collaboration skills, whereas there was no positive effect of the incomplete concept maps on every dimension of collaboration skills. However, the combination between the two treatments improved the collaboration skills more than implementing any of the two treatments individually. Even though there was no interaction effect between both treatments, the students in the CSICM condition produced high levels in all dimensions of collaboration skills compared to the students in the ICMO and the DWS conditions. However, they outperformed the students in the CSO condition only regarding high level reactions to answers. The case studies suggest that although the students in the ICMO condition may not be able to engage in all dimensions of collaboration skills, they are able to engage in high level of content related discourse quality. In this way, supporting the students with the prompt-based collaboration script and incomplete concept maps together seemed to lead the students to conduct more elaborative discussions focusing on more elaboration of the content and enable the students to engage in strategies of questioning, answering, and giving reactions to answers, which at the end may have enabled the students in the CSICM condition to outperform the students in the ICMO and the DWS conditions in all three dimensions of collaboration skills. Moreover, such combination between the two treatments seemed to enable the students to increase their discussions about each single answer and support their reactions to answers with more comments and justifications compared to students in the CSO condition who did not receive conceptual support concerning the content. This may be the reason why the students in the CSICM condition outperformed those in the CSO condition only with respect to high level reactions to answers, but there was no statistically significant difference between the two conditions regarding high level questions and high level answers.

With respect to the quality of published websites, the results showed that the collaboration script can improve the quality of published websites more than the control condition. On the other hand, there is no significant difference between incomplete concept maps and unstructured condition. Moreover, the students in the CSICM condition more often

produced high quality websites compared to all other conditions. The greatest positive influence of the combination between both treatments may be due to the collaboration script which may have been internalized and used for structuring the interactive processes between learning partners, which is in the same line with prior researches, such as (Kollar et al., 2006). Simultaneously, incomplete concept maps seemed to enable the students to improve knowledge retention and engage them in visual learning that is expected to improve creative thinking and deep understanding of the content. This in turn may facilitate the acquisition of knowledge and skills needed for building and publishing high quality websites, which confirms the findings of concept maps reported by Boujaoude and Attieh (2003), van Drie and van Boxtel (2003), and Williams (2004). Thus, supporting the students with collaboration scripts and incomplete concept maps may enable them to easily communicate, interact, and transfer their knowledge and experiences when discussing the problems and weaknesses of their websites, which at the end may also enable them to improve their websites more than any other condition.

8.3.2. Effects of the combination of collaboration script and incomplete concept maps on individual learning outcomes

Overall, no interaction effects can be identified with respect to the individual learning outcomes. In terms of both factual knowledge on web design and standards for designing websites, as well as web design skills, the results showed that the individual learning outcomes can be achieved by using any of the treatments individually. However, the combination of collaboration script and incomplete concept maps led to the greatest positive influence, going beyond what could be achieved by each of the two scaffolds individually. As both social and content scaffolding facilitated the acquisition of web design knowledge and skills, it might be expected that both treatments add up. A possible explanation is that the collaboration script probably fostered learning activities that would have led to the acquisition of domain-specific knowledge and domain-specific skills. The high levels of all three dimensions of collaboration skills and the consequence of having appropriate feedback during the dyads’ discussions may have led to the improvement of the individual learning outcomes. In addition, the prompt-based collaboration script seemed to engage the students in a guided peer questioning strategy to ask more task-related, thought-provoking questions.

The case studies showed that the students were able to ask this kind of questions through the unstructured chat session. Such kind of questions is likely to engage students in high-level interactions, which may facilitate the acquisition of the individual learning outcomes (King, 1990). On the other hand, simultaneous incomplete concept maps seemed to enable group members of the CSICM conditions to elaborate more deeply on contents and therefore better retain the knowledge acquired (see Hall et al., 2004). Moreover, this scaffold may encourage students to think more about concepts and relations in content (see Schau et al., 1997) and engage the students in meaningful content-based discussions, which in turn may lead to the facilitation of the acquisition of both factual knowledge on web design concepts and web

design skills. This agrees with assumptions of Baker (2003); Suthers and Hundhausen (2003);

Toth et al. (2002); Wehry et al. (2010).