Using Posting Templates for Enhancing Students' Argumentative Elaborations in Learning Villages

Learning Villages (LV) is a game-based computersupported collaborative learning (CSCL) platform, which facilitates students’ issue-based discussion in a massively multiplayer gaming environment to attain the goal of argumentative knowledge construction. However, such construction can be achieved only if students can make argumentative elaborations properly in order to benefit from CSCL. This paper discusses our research on the use of posting templates to enhance students’ argumentative elaborations in LV. Seventy-four fifth-grade students and two of their teachers from two Hong Kong elementary schools participated in the present study. Results confirm that posting templates, to a certain extent, could assist the students in constructing arguments containing reasons and grounds to rationalize and warrant these arguments. In addition to the provision of the posting templates, we also found students’ face-to-face peersharing (facilitated by the teachers) could help them reach and s...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: DIGITEL
• Authors: Morris Siu Yung Jong, Alex W. C. Tse, Yuxia Zhou, Weiqin Chen, Fong-lok Lee, Jimmy Ho-Man Lee
• Keywords: Argumentative, Argumentative Elaborations, Argumentative Knowledge Construction, Artificial Intelligence, DIGITEL 2008