Recommendations for implementation

Some important aspects associated with a successful implementation of a computer-supported collaborative writing scenario in a vocational education context can be derived from the experience emerging from this research. These considerations represent the key aspect allowing us to reply to the second question associated with the design of the learning activity: How can collaboration be prompted and enhanced through efficient activity design?

In the first place, it is important for learners to truly engage in the scenario, as both the individually written productions and the interactions among them, both in written and oral format, will depend on the way learners will take part to the activity, writing interesting text in which they share meaningful episodes, and providing each other with interesting suggestions and ideas. The experience derived from our implementations of the scenario highlighted that a high level of engagement of the participants in the activity proposed reveals crucial for it to be fully integrated in the class curriculum.

In the first study implemented, the teachers participated in the finalisation of the materials and the design, but were less involved in the conceptualisation of the activity, and this reflected in the students perceiving the activity as an external intervention. This resulted in a different attitude towards the scenario, less engaged in the completion of the task, if compared to the second study, in which the involvement of the teachers in all the phases of the design of the activity comported a clearer integration of the task in the curriculum, and reflected in a higher engagement of the learners in the task. This engagement could be observed in their attitude towards the activity, and in their participation to it, measured in terms of number of words written for the various phases of the task.

The oral discussion was also very lively. Both the participation to the oral and the written phases of the task surprised the teachers who expected for the students to be more resistant to the task.

The writing activity is considered as a task hardly accepted by the apprentices, who are not really eager in producing written texts. Even though the working environments in which they operate require

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154 them to write in various circumstances to produce reports and inform the colleagues about particular situations encountered, students tend to avoid the writing task required to them in the school environment. This is often associated with the fact that the learners choosing the vocational path are generally issued from a difficult educational path and associate writing to this type of pattern.

Additionally, various apprentices having migration background, the formal quality of their writing varies substantially, and this makes them feel insecure about their written productions. Finding the right ways to motivate learners in engaging in such an activity is, therefore, particularly important. As said above, the fact of integrating the writing activity in the curriculum represents a good practice we observed throughout this research. Additionally, the fact of writing on a computer was considered as a great added value by the learners, who declared feeling much more at ease with typing than with handwriting.

As discussed in the literature review of this thesis, the writing activity, considered by many as beneficial to learning (Hayes & Flower, 1980; Scardamalia & Bereiter, 1994; Galbraith, 1999; 2009), produced contrasting results when tested empirically. The recommendations provided by Tynjälä and colleagues (2001) to create effective writing activities revealed useful in this research and represented an effective guide in the design of the tasks proposed to students, even though some aspects were adapted to the specific context of our research. In the first place, the authors mentioned that the writing task should require conceptual change and knowledge transformation/construction. To this regard, our activity meets this requirement, as learners are supposed, through this scenario, to acquire new concepts and understanding of the procedures discussed. The second recommendation is associated with the idea that students’ previous knowledge and beliefs should be taken into account. In particular free-writing exercises should be used before studying the topic. In the case of our vocational school, this is not possible, as apprentices have the right to perform in practice only professional acts that were already studied in school. We asked, however, participants to write difficult situations encountered in school and proceed to peer-comments before the class discussion in which the teacher would also intervene by providing theoretical elements. Additionally, according to the third recommendation the writing tasks should encourage students to reflect about their own experiences. To this respect, this activity is a perfect example of the type of task imagined by Tynjälä and colleagues as it is completely based on a reflection on learner experiences. Moreover, the authors suggested that students should be encouraged to solve practical problems by applying theoretical knowledge, and in this case again, the learning scenario prepared aims at performing exactly this type of activity, asking students to describe issues encountered in practice and consider new solution between them and with the teacher. In this context, the theory associated with the practical problem will be discussed and integrated in the situation. The fact that the practical problem treated is directly issued from the personal experience of each student is particularly relevant, in our opinion, as highly motivating for the participants. Finally, the fifth recommendation considered that the tasks should be integrated within the class curriculum, by

155 organising discussions and small group activities around them. As mentioned above, this is a conclusion that was derived empirically from the implementation of our studies. Both discussion (oral with all the class) and small group activities (written peer-commenting) were conducted in our scenario. For all of the above reasons, we consider that this scenario represent an example of how to integrate all the recommendations provided by Tynjälä and colleagues. We believe, after our research implementation, that the points listed above represent indeed very central issue for the design of an effective writing activity.

As far as the peer-collaboration is concerned in this case again we identified a series of aspects that would play a role in the effectiveness of the implementation of this type of activity. More particularly, we identified various studies suggesting how the use of prompts represents a key feature of successful peer-collaboration task, as collaboration does not or seldom happens spontaneously (Dillenbourg &

Fischer, 2007). This research provides a set of instructional recommendations for the design of the activity and the scaffolding elements to be used to obtain effective peer-feedback and constructive interactions among students. In the first place, for example, we observed that effective interactions were issued from situations in which students in their peer-feedback provided concrete suggestions or reported personal experiences in similar situations (Kuhn, Shaw, & Felton, 1997). Questions (King, 2007) and generic comments were also interesting elements of discussion and, in particular, questions were an excellent ways of getting into the activity in a progressive manner. On the other hand, it is when faced with concrete new solutions to an issue that the apprentices were able to come up with new concrete alternatives to their behaviour and the complete interactions revealed more productive.

According to the results of our research, both types of scripts identified by Weinberger, Ertl, Fischer and Mandl (2005), epistemic and social scripts, reveal of great relevance. In particular, the epistemic scripts are of key importance to specifying and sequencing the knowledge construction activities and defining the strategy for the execution of the task, both in the individual (description of the critical situation) and the collaborative (peer-commenting task) phases of the scenario. Social scripts, on the other hand, sequence the interaction of the students in productive exchanges. In this sense, epistemic scripts structure the task to facilitate knowledge construction, while social scripts facilitate the interaction among students. On the basis of the literature review, we believe that adaptable (Wang et al., 2011) and flexible (Dillenbourg and Tchounikine, 2007) scripting would also represent a very interesting option in this type of situation as this would allow learners to act on the prompts provided, stimulating their self-regulated learning. To this respect, the idea of, in successive implementation of this scenario, fading the prompts provided to learners (Gavota, Schneider, & Bétrancourt, 2010) represents a very interesting perspective, and would deserve to be further explored.

We consider that all aspects mentioned above should be taken into account when designing a scenario based on writing and peer-collaboration activities as a mean to bridge the gap between school and the workplace and even beyond this scope. These elements should be kept in mind when adapting and

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156 modifying the pedagogical scenario developed in the framework of this thesis to different target audience or different pedagogical scopes.