Strategic Collaboration Support in a Web-based Scientific Inquiry Environment

This paper describes our work-in-progress toward developing indirect, strategic support for collaborative learners in a web-based scientific inquiry environment. Using the distribution of students’ current problem solving strategies and their most likely predicted future behaviors, we plan to strategically construct collaborative learning groups containing heterogeneous combinations of various behaviors such that students with less efficient strategies will likely adopt the strategies of their more efficient peers. The objective of this research is to explore the possibility of facilitating peer interaction through strategic pairing and facilitation, with a minimal amount of direct instructional intervention.