Collaborative Learning
A common approach to designing collaborative learning is to develop highly structured group activities to guide students to complete pre-planned tasks and progress to the desired cognitive level (Gasevic et al., 2015). Another approach, called idea-centered collaboration (Hong & Chai, 2017), involves a less-structured process where groups of learners develop and refine ideas continually without any fixed format and pre-determined tasks. Many students do not know how to collaborate due to a lack of learning management skills and self-regulation skills (Bjork et al., 2013). Therefore, they tend to focus on low-level cognitive activities (Hong, 2014) rather than to continuously advance their conceptual understanding during collaboration. To address these challenges, it is pivotal to incorporate both the structured and idea-centered approaches to collaboration. The structured approach provides well-defined procedures that can help students regulate the group process. The idea-centered method can support learners to achieve higher levels of cognitive thinking (Hong & Chai, 2017).
However, current research focuses on either the structured (e.g., Scheuer et al., 2014) or the idea-centered method (e.g., van Aalst & Truong, 2011). There is little effort to apply both approaches to address the challenges facing learners and maximize the support for their collaboration. To fill this gap, this study aims to incorporate both the structured and the idea-centered approaches to guide the design of Scholarly Conversation. The Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework (Garrison & Anderson, 2003, pp. 27-31) is adopted to design the structured components of Scholarly Conversation. Knowledge Building pedagogy (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 2014) is used to embed the idea-centered principles into Scholarly Conversations.