Hi Marcela!  Middle school students could certainly benefit from a system that would support their thinking as they make sense of new phenomena.  I am also thinking about how such a system could support their teachers who might need help in putting these kind of structures in place in their classroom, if they are not comfortable facilitating such work in other ways even when they know they want this kind of collaboration and analysis to happen.  At the same time, such an online environment might need support for the middle school teacher to know whether their students' work is productive.  

What kind of support?

Hi Daniel,

The amount of reflections vary by instructors and courses. Some have had students reflect 5 times- having five discussions with reflections, one every two weeks over 10 weeks. Other instructors have two-three discussions as a way to synthesize course concepts at critical points in the course. One instructor has only used the discussion and reflection once, as a way to introduce students to important aspects of collaboration. 

Hi Carrie,

The system is set up such that there is a reflection tab for each chat space, but whether or not it is required is completely up to the teacher. The teacher can also modify what students reflect on by revising what is there, choosing which items to reflect on, or adding new items.

Hi Jim, we conducted a study in a real classroom with 13 teams and then tracked the quality of their communication processes over time. We found significant improvement in the quality of their conversations about course concepts, particularly with regard to discussing alternative perspectives and quality of claims. I include a link below to the article. We also found that the students actually worked to make sense of their discussion processes to try to understand them and figure out how to improve. We have another study that will be sent out in a month that repeats the study, but this time with far less instructor feedback... no spoilers here on how that turned out. We have also been piloting studies with faculty across different departments. One really interesting context we are currently working with is a cultural psychology course that talks about issues of race and gender. We are interested in seeing whether these types of emotionally latent conversations can also be improved.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11412-018-9270-5

Great question! We actually have attempted to examine an aspect of this for social media, but have yet to adapt the study for that sole purpose. Nonetheless, what we have found so far is that providing models of competence for how to behave in social media contexts (in learning settings) combined with reflection about ongoing activity in that setting can result in high quality social media conversations centered around course concepts- even when instructor presence fades. However, I think it would be very interesting to modify the reflective criterial in CREATE to help young students develop social media competencies- and that is very doable with the flexibility of the system.