Children's Interactive Strategies Around Digital Technology in Collaborative Learning Environments

The current study examines how children develop different interactional strategies around digital technology as they get enculturated within a community of design learners. Using a comparative case study of a single case we discuss how a student progresses from individual to collective interactional strategies, over a period of time, as she collaborates around digital technology in a small design group. We then discuss the social affordances of technology and its importance in developing technology integration models. Technology integration in collaborative learning The introduction of screen-based technologies has led to improvements in developing both academic and 21st century skills and hence many schools have quickly adopted one computer per student initiatives in a classroom (Freeman et al., 2017; Swallow, 2017). However, the mere addition of technology in learning environments is not a sufficient condition to ensure improvements in learning outcomes, since technology presents trade-offs that interact with individual and group processes (Jeong & Hmelo-Silver, 2016; Kirkwood & Price, 2014; Lim & Chai, 2008). Our previous work suggests that digital technology affords different kinds of interactions in collaborative learning environment that are especially problematic in developing shared understanding among young children (Toprani, Yan, & Borge, 2016). These findings led us to further unpack the results on a time scale to understand if these processes are impacted by continued participation within a community of learners. Towards this goal, the current study aims at identifying the interactional strategies that students use around digital technology as a part of learning design, over a period of time, and subsequently analyzing their development within the larger culture of design practices. Technology has been efficiently used to widen the scope of learning by providing more competent tools to learn with, however, it’s potential to bring about a shift from traditional instructional approach to a studentcentered instructional approach fostering higher-order thinking processes are preliminarily developed (Kirkwood & Price, 2014). There is a need for developing technology integration models that approach the process from a nested, systemic perspective where the role of technology is studied in relation to factors like curriculum, teaching pedagogies, learner’s needs, and the learning goals (Veletsianos, 2016). We conceptualize collaboration as a nested process between individuals, small groups, and the larger classroom community. During this process participants are engaging in higher-order thinking: developing a joint understanding about the idea, collectively critiquing the idea, discussing alternative perspectives, evaluating its feasibility, and negotiating solutions so as to create new knowledge (Stahl, 2006). Studies that look at collaboration from a nested, knowledgebuilding perspective have found technology to have a more ambiguous and distributed impact on learning because of the interplay of a number of factors (Jeong & Hmelo-Silver, 2016; Toprani et al., 2016). Hence, in the current study we intend to explore How student’s strategies around digital technology change as they become a part of the community of design learners? To take a systemic perspective, we explore these ideas in relation to one student’s process of getting enculturated within the afterschool club over a period of two years. We view enculturation as a process that supports not only the acquisition of knowledge but also development of judgements around its application (Tishman, Jay, Perkins, 1993). We track the development of a student, “Catherine”, who was a part of the afterschool club for more than two years (four semesters). We identify the collaborative strategies she developed around digital technology in relation to her continued participation at the club. The study is designed from the student’s vantage point to understand technology’s affordances within a sociotechnical system i.e. what the technology offers and how the students develop social processes to make use of it. We observe Catherine’s interactional strategies over a period of two years, within the larger framework of the afterschool club’s cultural practices to understand how her interactional strategies change. Context and data selection The current study is situated within an afterschool club, developed to promote design thinking among 8-12 years old students, in North East United States. The club is conducted weekly and each session is 75 minutes long where students work on design projects in teams of three or four. The goal of the club is to help students go through different design stages of questioning, planning, creating, and finally evaluating their design prototype against the initial client requirements. As a part of this project, Catherine, joined the club as a 4 grader and returned to the CSCL 2019 Proceedings 589 © ISLS club every semester starting Fall 2015, until Spring 2017 (i.e. four semesters). Her case provides a unique perspective to understand how student’s collaborative strategies develop as they get enculturated through the club activities and experiences. Catherine, in her first semester was grouped with three other students of her age: Kathy, Eric, and Aron. They worked on creating a garden for a fictional client named Fred. In Spring 2017, Catherine was grouped with the same members Eric and Aron, and the fourth member was changed to Marcos. In this semester they were again creating a butterfly garden for Fred with a different set of requirements. In both the semesters students would create a Lego plan of their design and then recreate the same design in Minecraft, incorporating minor revisions. We selected Catherine, because she has been in the club the longest without missing any semesters. We compared Catherine’s collaborative strategies around digital technology across three semesters i.e. Fall 2015 (FA15) and Spring 2016 (SP16), when she was a novice to the design club’s culture, and Spring 2017 (SP17), when she was enculturated in the design club based on her participation for four semesters. By systematically reviewing video data and curriculum plan we selected one comparable lesson for each of the three time points. Across the three semesters, we selected the first lesson when they started designing with digital technologies.