Abstracts - Earli

discussion (Gunawardena et al, 1997; Järvelä & Häkkinen, 2000; Garrison, 2003). We haveanalyzed the contributions posted by the participants (both the teacher and her 17 students) in adebate forum on "homogeneous groups as a marker of attention to diversity" over a 3-week period.The debate forum was a part of a broader Moodle course on "Educational Psychology". The mostinteresting results point out several types and levels of cognitive presence, depending on (1) thecognitive level of the participants’ individual posts, the functional and contextualized use of thecontents that these posts show, and the evolution of these two variables; and (2) the profundity andprogress of the sociocognitive process of the discussion. Furthermore, the results show thateffective learning depends on the congruencies and discrepancies that are established between thedifferent levels of cognitive presence and its evolution. Taken together, the results of this studyimprove our understanding of both the characteristics and the evolution of the processes ofindividual and social construction of knowledge in online discussions, and shows that the analysisof cognitive presence is a valid procedure for understanding the quality of learning in a text-basedasynchronous learning environment.K 1431 August 2007 08:30 - 10:30Room: 0.100BSymposiumFacilitating and analysing roles in computer-supported collaborativelearningChair: Armin Weinberger, Ludwig Maximillians University, GermanyOrganiser: Jan-Willem Strijbos, Leiden University, NetherlandsOrganiser: Armin Weinberger, Ludwig Maximillians University, GermanyDiscussant: Sanna Järvelä, Oulu University, FinlandDuring the past five years, the ‘role’ concept has become a promising construct for facilitating andanalysing Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL). Roles can be defined as more orless explicit functions or responsibilities to guide individual members’ behaviour and regulate theirgroup interaction (Hare, 1994). Roles can promote awareness of the overall group performanceand member’s contribution (Strijbos, Martens, Jochems, & Broers, 2004). However, the roledistribution is not always optimal from a learning viewpoint, and some students are more inclinedto take up a role voluntarily. In CSCL research roughly two perspectives regarding roles exist:scripted roles that aim to facilitate collaborative learning processes and roles that emergespontaneously developed by the participants in support of their collaborative learning activities.Scripted roles perspective. Roles can be assigned to learners as instructional support to structurethe collaborative process; this is also referred to as ‘scripting’ (O’Donnell & Dansereau, 1992;Dillenbourg 2002; Weinberger, 2003). These roles are either content-oriented or process-oriented.A content-oriented role, like a summarizer, has been found to stimulate higher levels of knowledgeacquisition (Schellens, Van Keer, & Valcke, in press). A process-oriented role specifies members’individual responsibilities to stimulate coordination (Strijbos et al., 2004). Emergent spontaneousroles perspective. Roles can emerge spontaneously without scripting being provided (Strijbos, DeLaat, Martens, & Jochems, 2005), and the concept of roles can be applied to analyze the individualcontributions and interaction patterns during collaborative learning (De Laat, 2005; Hermann,Jahnke, & Loser, 2004; Pilkington & Walker, 2003). This symposium will focus on both– 615 –