People working collaboratively must establish and maintain awareness of one another's intentions, actions, and results. Understanding the role of awareness in computer-supported collaborative work (CSCW) and developing effective software tools to support awareness are keys to the future success of CSCW systems. This project will develop and evaluate a suite of awareness tools to support coordinated planning, action, and outcome analysis in collaborative science learning. Classroom-based field studies will be coordinated with a series of laboratory investigations, to benefit from both the scope and ecological validity of a field study and the analytical focus and control of laboratory studies. Laboratory studies will adapt task simulation methods, including the use of confederate participants, from the social psychology of communication. A key scientific objective is to investigate and develop the notion of activity awareness, the awareness of project work that supports group performance in complex and long-term tasks. Activity awareness builds upon prior research on social awareness (of the presence of one's collaborators) and action awareness (of what collaborators are doing or what they have recently done). Developing a concept of activity awareness can further integrate awareness research and tool support.
