Abstracts - Earli

these classes. By interviewing key persons and teachers in the project more insights intomechanisms resulting in students’ surprisingly good reading test results will hopefully emerge.Classroom climate, social interaction in the classroom, teachers’ expectations and teachers’engagement and are fields of interest yet to be highlighted. With this broad attempt to viewreading acquisition and reading comprehension interesting future areas of development areemerging, calling for further research using multiple methods.B 1828 August 2007 17:30 - 18:50Room: 0.87 MarxPaper SessionComputer-supported learning environmentsChair:Tina Hascher, Universität Salzburg, AustriaEffects of constructivist technology-intensive learning environments versus traditional ones onstudents’ achievement: A meta-analysisYigal Rosen, University of Haifa, IsraelDifferent learning environments provide different learning experiences and ought to serve differentachievement goals. It was hypothesized that constructivist learning environments lead to theattainment of achievements that are consistent with the experiences that such settings provide andthat more traditional settings lead to the attainments of other kinds of achievement in accordancewith the experiences they provide. A meta-analytic study was carried out on 32 methodologicallyappropriateexperiments in which these two settings were compared. Results supported one of thehypotheses showing that overall constructivist learning environments are more effective thantraditional ones (ES=.46) and that their superiority increases when tested against constructivistappropriatemeasures (ES=.90). However, contrary to expectations, traditional settings did notdiffer from constructivist ones when traditionally-appropriate measures were used. A number ofpossible interpretations are offered among them the possibility that traditional settings have cometo incorporate some constructivist elements. This possibility is supported by other findings of thisstudy such as smaller effect sizes for more recent studies and for longer lasting periods ofinstruction.What is it? Students’ pursuing problems in a CSCL environment designed within the field ofscience educationIngeborg Krange, University of Oslo, NorwaySten Ludvigsen, University of Oslo, NorwayWe address how students approach curriculum based problems as a cultural phenomenon inscience education. We follow a group of four students who solve a biological problem, and studyhow different cultural tools at an institutional and disciplinary level together with the computerdevices structure the students’ problem solving interactions. Our aim is to identify improvementsfor how the knowledge domain can be productively fostered in the educational setting and identifypossible implications for further designs of CSCL environments. The data are gathered from adesign experiment in a secondary science classroom and video data are used to perform interaction– 106 –