Compiling Theoretical Components

Yesterday (Saturday, September 20, 2008), I spent the day going through CSCL theory and pulling out components to include in my table. Works from Sawyer, 2006; Scardamalia & Bereiter, 2006, and Stahl, Koschmann & Suthers, 2006 were resources for the following collection of components: 1. Build instruction based upon students' prior knowledge and community knowledge advancement; 2. Provide scaffolding that is tailored to the learners needs in achieving the goals of the moment; 3. Scaffolding is added gradually, modified, and removed based on the needs of the learner; 4. Allow opportunities for students to Externalize and Articulate their unformed and still developing understanding of concepts. Discourse becomes a means for collaborative problem solving. As understanding becomes more developed, articulation and externalization act as reinforces for learning in an interative knowledge building process where knowledge develops as ideas improvement; 5. Provide opportuities for reflection on cognitive activities or metacognition. Give students time to reflect on the process of learning and on the knowledge they are acquiring. Understanding is emergent; and 6. Build instruction from the concrete to the abstract. When trying to present abstract concepts, use concrete examples to help convey meaning--constructive use of authoritative information. In looking for assessment strategies, I added the work of Means, 2006 to my literature review. Means provided the following guidelines for assessment: 1. Formative assessment should be designed to assess learning and to inform future instruction; 2. The assessment should provide further learning opportunities on the content; 3. It should reveal specific information about students' thinking in ways that can inform further instruction and additional learning opportunities; and 4. Learning activities are created based on information gained from the formative assessment.