Collaborative drawing on a shared digital canvas in elementary science education: The effects of script and task awareness support

Creating shared representations can foster knowledge acquisition by elementary school students by promoting active integration and translation of new information. In this study, we investigate to what extent awareness support and scripting facilitate knowledge construction and discourse quality of elementary school students (n = 94) in a computer-supported collaborative drawing scenario. Students in the awareness condition received feedback prompts based on the characteristics of their drawing. The script foresaw a sequence of creating, comparing, discussing, and merging individual drawings to arrive at a shared representation of the subject matter, which was photosynthesis. Both forms of support, (awareness and scripting) facilitated the learning processes and outcomes. Discourse analysis revealed that awareness and scripting increased (the share of) integrative and conflict-oriented consensus-building activities as well as (the share of) off-task and coordination-related activities in comparison to the control group. Awareness and scripting facilitated deeper understanding of the processes and relations of domain concepts. The scripted students acquired significantly more conceptual knowledge than the unscripted students.