Grounding Support for Effective Collaborative Learning

Abstract

A common ground of knowledge is the foundation for collaborative learning. However, learners often do not know how to engage in beneficial grounding activities during collaboration, which highlights the need to support such activities and the development of grounding skills. Two prominent forms of support are collaboration scripts and cognitive group awareness tools that pursue different approaches to promoting grounding. While collaboration scripts explicitly ask learners to perform related activities to trigger the exchange of relevant information, cognitive group awareness tools directly provide relevant information about learning partners to implicitly guide learners during learning processes. The present paper examines how the two approaches differ in supporting grounding activities and to what extent they support the development of grounding skills that represent a key qualification of collaborative learning. In the next step of this research project on grounding, the question of how to support the long-term development of grounding skills will be investigated.