Promoting reflective interactions in a CSCL environment

Engaging in reflective activities in interaction, such as explaining, justifying and evaluating problem solutions, has been shown to be potentially productive for learning. This paper addresses the problem of how these activities may be promoted in the context of computer-mediated communication during a modelling task in physics. The design principles of two different communication interfaces are presented. The first allows free text to be exchanged, and the second structures the interaction by providing a restricted set of communicative possibilities. Comparative analyses of interaction corpora produced with the two communication interfaces are then described. The analyses show that use of the second structured interface in performing the problem-solving task is feasible for students, and that it promotes a task-focussed and reflective interaction. In conclusion the different resources provided by different media and the relative degrees of effort that their use requires are discussed.