Characteristics of university students ’ inquiry in individual and computer - supported collaborative study

A comparison study was designed to investigate the characteristics of university students’ inquiry in two conditions involving either computer-supported collaboration or more traditional individual writing assignments. About 80 students participated in a lecture course on the psychology of learning and thinking. Between their weekly lectures a subset of the students worked in small groups within the Future Learning Environment (FLE) and the remaining students produced learning logs and written comments on each other’s learning logs. A qualitative content analysis of these processes revealed differences between the explanation and problem-setting practices between the two conditions. The FLE-groups were observed to produce a higher proportion of problems and metacomments than the comparison-groups. On the other hand, the traditional groups produced a higher proportion of own explanations compared to the FLE-groups. The two conditions did not differ in the proportion of scientific explanations they produced. The individual and social aspects of inquiry are discussed.