TY - JOUR
T1 - Scaffolding peer-questioning strategies to facilitate metacognition during online small group discussion
AU - Choi, Ikseon
AU - Land, Susan M.
AU - Turgeon, Alfred J.
N1 - Funding Information:
A part of this research was supported by the Pennsylvania Turfgrass Council. This manuscript is based on the doctoral dissertation conducted by the first author at the Pennsylvania State University.
PY - 2005/11
Y1 - 2005/11
N2 - Meaningful discussion that facilitates reflective thinking can be initiated when learners raise thoughtful questions or provide critical feedback; however, generating effective questions requires a certain level of domain knowledge and metacognitive skills of the question-askers. We propose a peer-questioning scaffolding framework intended to facilitate metacognition and learning through scaffolding effective peer-questioning in online discussion. This framework assumes that novice students who lack domain and metacognitive knowledge can be scaffolded to generate meaningful interactions at an early stage of learning and the resulting peer-generated adaptive questions can facilitate learners' metacognition. Thus, this study investigated the effects of providing online scaffolding for generating adaptive questions to peers during online small group discussion. A field experimental time-series control-group design was employed as a mixed model for the research design. Thirty-nine college students from an online introductory class on turfgrass management participated in the study. The findings revealed that the scaffolds were useful to increase the frequency of student questioning behavior during online discussion. For some students, the online guidance reportedly served as "a starting point" to generate questions when they had difficulty asking questions. However, the guidance did not improve the quality of questions and thus learning outcomes. The interview data indicated that peer-generated adaptive questions served a critical role in facilitating learner's reflection and knowledge reconstruction. Further study should focus on the quality improvement of peer-generated questions while considering adaptive and dynamic forms of scaffolding and intermediate factors such as prior knowledge, metacognition, task complexity, and scaffolding type.
AB - Meaningful discussion that facilitates reflective thinking can be initiated when learners raise thoughtful questions or provide critical feedback; however, generating effective questions requires a certain level of domain knowledge and metacognitive skills of the question-askers. We propose a peer-questioning scaffolding framework intended to facilitate metacognition and learning through scaffolding effective peer-questioning in online discussion. This framework assumes that novice students who lack domain and metacognitive knowledge can be scaffolded to generate meaningful interactions at an early stage of learning and the resulting peer-generated adaptive questions can facilitate learners' metacognition. Thus, this study investigated the effects of providing online scaffolding for generating adaptive questions to peers during online small group discussion. A field experimental time-series control-group design was employed as a mixed model for the research design. Thirty-nine college students from an online introductory class on turfgrass management participated in the study. The findings revealed that the scaffolds were useful to increase the frequency of student questioning behavior during online discussion. For some students, the online guidance reportedly served as "a starting point" to generate questions when they had difficulty asking questions. However, the guidance did not improve the quality of questions and thus learning outcomes. The interview data indicated that peer-generated adaptive questions served a critical role in facilitating learner's reflection and knowledge reconstruction. Further study should focus on the quality improvement of peer-generated questions while considering adaptive and dynamic forms of scaffolding and intermediate factors such as prior knowledge, metacognition, task complexity, and scaffolding type.
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U2 - 10.1007/s11251-005-1277-4
DO - 10.1007/s11251-005-1277-4
M3 - Review article
AN - SCOPUS:26844567188
SN - 0020-4277
VL - 33
SP - 483
EP - 511
JO - Instructional Science
JF - Instructional Science
IS - 5-6
ER -