Representational scripting to support students’ online problem-solving performance

Abstract

This study investigated the effects of representational scripting on student learning while online collaboratively solving a complex problem. The premise here is that effective student interaction would be evoked when the problem-solving task is structured into part-tasks that are supported by providing part-task congruent representations (i.e., representational scripting). It was hypothesized that such an approach would lead to a more appropriate student interaction and as a consequence better problem-solving performance. In triads secondary education students worked on a case-based business-economics problem in four experimental conditions, namely one condition in which the groups received representations that were congruent for all three part-tasks and three conditions in which the groups received one of these representations for all three part-tasks. The results show that using representational sripting indeed leads to a more elaborated discussion about the content of the knowledge domain (i.e., concepts, solutions and relations) and to better problem-solving performance.