Scripting the Collaboration for Exploiting the Learning Affordances of a Modeling Environment

This paper describes two studies that explored how specific instructional measures enabled students to take advantage of the diagrammatic representations of a learning environment for conducting effective collaborative modeling. The two studies employed different instructional measures to support collaborative learning and employed two different research designs. One study was a case study with video analysis while the other compared achievement scores of two groups. Results from both studies complete each other and show the combined and integrated need for structuring the collaboration as well as for providing concrete visual anchors for collaboration. The studies show that the affordances of the learning environment get exploited by appropriate scripting.