A preliminary study of university students’ collaborative learning behavior patterns in the context of online argumentation learning activities: The role of idea-centered collaborative argumentation instruction

Learners have more and more opportunities to encounter a variety of socio-scientific issues (SSIs) and they may have difficulties in collaborative argumentation on SSIs. Knowledge building is a theory about idea-centered collaborative knowledge innovation and creation. The application of idea-centered collaboration practice as emphasized in knowledge building may be helpful for facilitating students’ collaborative argumentation. To examine the perspective above, this study attempted to integrate idea-centered collaboration into argumentation practice. The participants were 48 university students and were randomly divided into experimental and control group (n=24 for both groups). The control group only received argumentation instruction, while the experimental group received explicit idea-centered collaborative argumentation (CA) instruction. This study found that two groups of students revealed different collaborative learning behavior patterns. It is also noted that the students in the experimental group benefited more in collaborative argumentation from the proper adaption of knowledge building and explicit idea-centered collaborative argumentation instruction.