Interdisciplinary (99) The use of online social networking to transfer the collaborative approach from small classes of fifteen to twenty students to large classes divided into comparable sized groups is being developed and evaluated. The approach is based on a successful course on scientific problem solving currently offered to small sections. The course uses puzzles to develop metacognitive strategies that can be transferred to other STEM courses and to student research efforts. A problem is presented to the class and then attacked collectively. The instructor facilitates the discussion with various strategies designed to encourage metacognition, such as "think alouds", collaborative drawing, and exchanging notebooks that track students' strategies and thinking processes. Students find this to be a transformative experience that provides them with learning models based on how their peers and their instructor strategize their problem solving.
Twenty students is about the limit of how many students can productively participate in collaborative problem solving in a classroom environment. The challenge being addressed is to make social networking tools effective for the task of fostering metacognitive engagement in learning and to develop tools to expand the reach of the course to larger classes. To this end, the existing course in scientific problem solving is augmented with social networking technology in the form of a structured online notebook that connects to the efforts of peers working on the same assignments. The existing course addresses problem solving per se and is independent of any particular content. As such, it provides a simple platform in which to test the contribution of social networking to the development of effective problem solving. Student feedback is used to improve the efficacy of the social networking environment through iterative updates.
This design research project developed ThinkSpace, a web application that provides a structured environment for solving problems in a community setting. Problems are presented within ThinkSpace, and students work the problems through a step-wise process. Once a student has made an entry at a particular step in the process, they have access to what their peers have entered, and are free to edit what they have already entered. Then they move onto the next steps, and the process repeats. The structure enables participants to work in parallel in a stepwise progression, independent of specific time and location, and yet their thinking processes are synchronized. The 5 steps in the problem solving process are supported by educational research and are sufficiently flexible that they can be adapted to many kinds of problems. Essentially, these steps are Define the problem, Brainstorm, Strategize, Attempt to solve, and Reflect. ThinkSpace promotes metacognition by making visible student thinking to themselves as well as to their peers. Learning to problem solve in ThinkSpace is intrinsic to use. While ThinkSpace supports and encourages collaboration, at its core it is a learning management system focused on training students in scientific problem solving. It differs from traditional learning management systems (e.g., D2L and BlackBoard) in that information is disseminated not just from instructor to student and student to instructor but from student to student as well. The latter is accomplished through structure and strategic guidance. ThinkSpace brings the student "behind the curtain" and makes them aware of their own learning patterns, encouraging reflection on more than "what is the answer" and into "how did I come to this answer?" By exposing students to peer process thinking, it provides an opportunity for students to appreciate the diversity of approaches possible. It also provides step-by-step peer modeling so that students, including those from underprivileged backgrounds, can learn the process skills needed to work effectively. ThinkSpace has been used in conjunction with the PI's course on scientific problem solving, "The Art of Scientific Discovery", taught at the University of Arizona. All student clicks on ThinkSpace are recorded along with any entry text associated with the click. This makes possible the visualization of student activities in the form of thought trails, and these can be characterized by an index that reflects the degree of voluntary, reflective activity exhibited by students in using ThinkSpace. Such data mining enabled objective measures that documented continuing student acceptance and sustained engagement in their use of ThinkSpace. ThinkSpace is currently a candidate for commercialization by Tech Launch Arizona, the overseeing entity for technology transfer at the University of Arizona. Commercialization will enable ThinkSpace to be self-sustaining and to benefit more students by providing a robust platform for a pedagogy to teach problem solving life skills.
