Research has suggested that how learners act in CSCL environments is considerably influenced by their internal collaboration scripts. These scripts are knowledge structures that reside in an individual’s memory and consist of play, scene, scriptlet, and role components. In its “internal script configuration principle,” the Script Theory of Guidance suggests that as learners work in a CSCL environment, these components are dynamically (re-)configured, and that this (re-)configuration is influenced by the goals of the individual learner. However, this principle has not yet been tested empirically.
In this study, upon entering a CSCL environment, we therefore experimentally manipulated the goals that students pursued while learning. In one condition, we induced learning goals while in the other condition, no goals were induced. A total of 233 pre-service teachers collaborated in dyads on the task to analyze an authentic, problematic classroom situation by aid of educational evidence. We measured their internal scripts both at pre-test (i.e., before collaboration and before goal induction) and post-test (i.e., after collaboration and goal induction), focusing on the scriptlet level.
Results show that goal induction had no effects on the kinds of scriptlets participants selected during collaboration. However, results from Epistemic Network Analysis show that learning goal induction led to significantly different combinations of scriptlets (especially to more relations between scriptlets that are indicative of pursuing learning goals) than no goal induction. Furthermore, participants from the learning goal induction acquired significantly more knowledge about educational theories and evidence than students from the control condition.
This study is among the first to provide direct evidence for the internal script configuration principle and demonstrates the effectiveness of inducing learning goals as a scaffold to support students’ knowledge acquisition processes in CSCL.