The role of individual preparation for knowledge construction in collaborative argumentation: An epistemic network analysis

Through collaborative argumentation, students gain in-depth understanding of learning content when they build on one another’s knowledge. Although individual preparation (IP) is found to be effective to foster collaborative learning, the mechanism of how IP influence the knowledge construction behavior is underexplored. This study investigated how IP influenced secondary school students in relation to knowledge construction behavioral patterns when participating in online collaborative argumentation activities. 20 students participated in two computer-supported collaborative argumentation lessons with one group with IP, and the other group without. Screen video recordings of students constructing arguments in groups during two lessons were collected and analyzed. Epistemic Network Analysis was conducted to examine students’ knowledge construction behaviors in the two lessons with and without IP. The results show that there were significant impact on students’ knowledge construction characteristics between the two lessons. Students who did not go through the IP phase tended to exhibit behaviors related to ideas refinement more than the students who went through the IP phase. The
implications of how to design and implement effective knowledge construction are discussed.