Grounding Collaborative Learning in Semantics-Based Critiquing

Related Work

Essay writing can be viewed as a design activity, producing a textual artifact—a document. A document consists of words and sentences. It has structuring (abstraction) and content production (composition) elements (Yamamoto, Takada, Gross, & Nakakoji, 1998). These are key aspects of any design process. More specifically, structuring defines the organization of the document in terms of sentences, paragraphs, and sections (i.e., levels of abstraction); whereas content production is about finding words and phrases and sequencing them into readable sentences, which again become part of paragraphs, and so on. A well-composed essay will communicate certain ideas, topics, or themes about some area of shared concern. Intermediate level abstractions, such as paragraphs and sections, serve as placeholders for complex ideas extended over multiple paragraphs so that the writers and readers can focus on one idea at a time while suppressing unimportant details.

The two basic activities of design are action and reflection (Schön, 1983), supporting composition and abstraction, respectively. Action means to create an artifact by selecting building blocks and combining them into functional arrangements, and reflection means to evaluate the artifact from multiple viewpoints (McCall, Fischer, & Mørch, 1990). When this occurs without external disruption other than situation-specific feedback, it is referred to as reflection-in-action (Schön, 1983). In a good process of design, the designer will rapidly cycle between action and reflection until the design is completed. During this process, the “back talk” of the situation signals to the designer when there is a need to switch to the other mode. This is communicated by means of an incomplete design (e.g., missing parts), inconsistency in arrangement of parts, or a need for restructuring the overall activity.