Student tools supported by collaboratively authored tasks: the case of work learning unit.

This research aims to devise a set of computer-based tools to meet the diverse needs of learners for comprehending a science learning unit, namely work. A model of computer-based tools on the learning unit for developing procedural knowledge for solving work problems was developed together with a set of teacher customization and collaboration tools. The main components, developed and implemented in an integrated manner for both students and teachers, are Student Activity Environment, Curriculum Authoring Center, Global Activity Center, and Teacher Collaboration Tools. The framework of supporting students through teachers' collaborative course authoring, considering the different backgrounds of the students and preferred teaching/learning style of teachers/students, was evaluated with students and teachers using two different task regimes. The evaluation studies presented encouraging and promising results.

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Misconceptions are troubling issues for teachers and students in science. This is especially true in school science and physics due to its often abstract nature. Students arrive in the science classroom with preconceptions that are often contradictory to accepted science thinking. These naive theories may lead to misconceptions and thus may interfere with accepted concept development (Welmar, 1996). Students may have two distinct perspectives of science: One is reserved for the formal learning setting in the classroom while the other is used outside that setting in everyday life (Cadmus, 1990; Driver, Squires, Rushworth, & Wood-Robinson, 1994). For example, students' misconceptions in work learning unit, that this study focuses, are identified as follows (Amasci, 2004): (a) failing to identify the direction in which a force is acting; (b) believing that any force times any distance is work; (c) believing that machines put out more work than we put it in: Not realizing that machines simply transform the form of the work we do; and (d) believing that the mass effects the work done under every condition.

Visualization of scientific phenomena and laboratory experiences have been important components of the reinforcement and understanding of physics concepts: Visualizing phenomena through demonstrations, simulations, models, real-time graphs, and video can contribute to students' understanding by attaching mental images to these concepts (Escalada, Grabhorn, & Zollman, 1996). These visualization techniques not only allow students to observe how objects behave and interact, but also provide students with visual associations that they may capture, and preserve the essence of physical phenomena more effectively than do verbal descriptions (Cadmus, 1990).

Computer simulations can help students to understand invisible conceptual worlds of science through animation, which can lead to more abstract understanding of scientific concepts (Hwang & Esquembre, 2003). Quantitative data can be manipulated and visualized to help students form a qualitative mental picture. Such complex experiences can help students identify patterns within simulations, and formulate explanations for phenomena in terms of models and theories. Simulations must not only allow learners to construct and manipulate screen "objects" to explore underlying concepts, but they must also provide learners with the observation and manipulation tools necessary for exploring and testing hypotheses in the simulated world (Jonassen, 1996). Combined with graphical representations, simulations should allow the learner to visualize abstract concepts and to link them to prior knowledge, thereby fostering conceptual learning.

These support measures typically guide science learners to (a) focus on particular variables of the underlying model, (b) generate hypotheses about relationships between these variables, (c) conduct simulated experiments to test the hypotheses, and (d) evaluate the hypotheses in the light of the observed results. These tasks are demanding but Chandler (2004) pointed out that interactive activities in science will be useful if they are specifically related to the learning unit and if the knowledge base of the learner is also taken into account. Teachers may customize and relate interactive computer-based activities for the learner by considering the knowledge base of the learner.

A study focusing on students' problems, should also consider the teachers' role in overcoming those problems. Real classroom interaction requires addressing specific learning problems and customization of lessons on an ongoing basis. When teachers are able to design and alter applications, they will then be better able to address learning problems. Many educators (Twining, 1995; Finlayson & Perry, 1995; Resnick, 1993) believe that using computers efficiently in instruction demands knowledge and understanding of hardware and software, philosophical understanding of the nature of subject and pedagogical skills and abilities related to class organization, management and teaching styles. According to Dunlap, Neale, and Carroll (2000; p. 15) teachers need (a) to derive information, monitor the use, and utilize the special resources that computer network technology makes available; (b) to have quick and easy access to the information salient to their planning; (c) notification of salient information and feedback about student progress and problems as well as teaching changes, and (d) ways of managing computer group work that allow for a better understanding of the actions of computer-mediated groups and their instructors and a better ability for teachers to make adjustments. Moreover, planning for remote collaborative work needs to be more flexible and relaxed to allow for instructional differences.

Computerized learning environments should not be built only by expert programmers. Rather, it is necessary to continue developing new types of cognitive environment tools, so that all teachers can participate in the construction of technology rich learning environments. A number of sophisticated tools have emerged for creating interactive multimedia software including commercially available products. The general purpose tools serve a variety of functions; however offer little in the way of design constraints governing the type of software, which can be produced. The result is a tool supporting a broad range of possible applications, but none of which can be created with much guidance from the tool itself. In doing so, they base the interaction around general models of instruction, which unfortunately are too general to serve as a specification for a piece of educational software (Bell, 1999). There is a rough principle that authoring tools tailored for specific tasks or instructional situations can better support the needs of the student and author/teacher for those situations (Murray, Blessing, & Ainsworth, 2003, p. 500). Many researchers (Salomon, 1990; Welch & Brownell, 2000) have pointed out that technology is effective when developers thoughtfully consider the merit and limitations of a particular application and when they employ effective pedagogical practices to achieve a specific objective. Further, Hasebrook and Gremm (1999) argued that learning gains are mainly due to instructional methods and thus many researchers aim at making their tutoring systems more effective using "intelligent" software technologies to adapt to the learners' demands, abilities and knowledge. The same applies to web-based educational applications, which are often limited to the capabilities of "electronic books" with little scope of interactivity for the students. Recently, there have been new efforts to transfer the technology of intelligent tutoring systems and authoring tools over the Internet. However, the development of such educational programs is a hard task that needs much effort from domain and computer experts. We argue that efforts are best placed in the middle ground between intelligent systems and the conventional, and should be used to develop a procedural learning environment. That extends the conceptions of simulations to the environment descriptions and typically gives a wider range of instructional functions to the user-system communication language.

PURPOSE OF THE STUDY

Currently available courseware packages for teaching the work unit may not meet different students' needs. Also, a single teacher, even with tools, is likely to have difficulties and may need the cooperation of other teachers in dealing with students' problems in the learning unit. Thus, courseware packages should continuously incorporate teachers' observations and assessment of student understanding in overcoming students' difficulties and provide teachers with collaboration tools to make courseware facilities fit individual students' needs. This study presents a new courseware design framework to overcome students' learning difficulties in a science learning unit, work. The courseware framework will then be tried out with students and teachers: (a) to evaluate effects of the system facilities for students' learning, with particular attention to the new interface and the effect of different task regimes, (b) to study classroom teachers' reactions about a web based knowledge and experience sharing platform as well as collaborative activity development.

DESIGN OF PROCEDURAL LEARNING ENVIRONMENT: WORKERS' WORLD

The learning unit, work, is not a commonly studied subject area in the software research. The review of literature both in science teaching and learning and use of technology suggest several requirements to be considered in the design of a learning environment for the chosen learning unit. To overcome children's difficulties in this area and to avoid developing misconceptions, a variety of teaching and learning approaches should be supported by learning environments to aid the user in proceduralising his/her interaction with the system and eventually be less prone to errors. A learning environment for studying abstractions should have a concrete object space (Thomson, 1992), which can accommodate activities. The activities reveal real world facts in order to represent the study domain in the environment. The environment should also provide two sets of mechanisms: one is for checking the validity of students' methods on the activities and the other is for providing feedback on the appropriateness of students' actions in relation to the presented task. Students can operate the object world in different ways by a student-environment interaction language. Their operations show the effects of their actions and connect to representations of the object space and its relations at higher levels of abstraction. This requires the environment to be able to move its presentation modes from concrete to symbolic as the learners gain competence. Hence the environment may enable a seamless transition (Draper et al., 1991; Kong & Kwok, 2005) from facts to formalism.

The learning environment should allow students to experiment with concepts and procedures in ways that relate to the student's experience to support guided discovery (Tait, 1994; Smeets, 2005) and directed methods of instruction. Learning in such an environments should be contextualized and procedural through different type of tasks. The teachers may manage task specifications in a curriculum management office (Akpinar & Hartley, 1996). Hence an extension and integration of the students' learning environment to the teachers' customization environment is necessary. Because students may need different tasks, teachers may share students' experiences and task regimes and may cooperate in developing new task regimes. Such collaboration may be realized through web-based data manipulation tools which can send data to students' environment.

The learning environment this study focuses upon should regulate the control between the student and the system, accommodate real-life tasks and their solution methods, which are rich in feedback and provide interactive illustrations supporting conceptual understanding, learner controlled inspections, and problem solving. Collins and Brown (1988) and Thompson (1992) suggested that through the structured procedure capturing systems, which offer simple devices, perceptually reflective learning on concrete items can be achieved. Through the students' manipulation and inspection, aspects of the device structure can then be explicitly represented, annotated, and become the subject of didactic discussion. On the basis of a firm conceptual understanding, the student's actions, as part of a procedure, are to be evaluated and responded to by the computer program to provide feedback about the effects the action would have in real world. The student then takes successive action and each time explores more information. Further, because developing a firm conceptual understanding of science domain depends heavily upon the constructive work with real world objects in a science community and because the students need building materials, tools, patterns, and sound work habits to learn operational relationships, the functional components of such "procedural environments" should have the architecture given in Figure 1.

The learning/teaching environment, Workers' World, proposed here, consists of mainly four components to provide teachers and students with pedagogical tools in studying work. These components are (a) Student Activity Environment, (b) Curriculum Authoring Center for Teachers, (c) Teacher Collaboration Tools, and (d) Global Activity Center.

Student Activity Environment

In a procedural learning environment, it is necessary to provide learners with an object-world whose properties represent the study domain. The object world should be associated with operator(s) carrying out procedure(s) in the study domain. The procedures must be completed by a learner on the operators. The environment is to monitor and evaluate these operations. The represented object world should respond in clearly observable ways which are easy to interpret by students. The students' interpretations and activities on the objects and operators will help them to relate previous experiences and informal knowledge to a semiformal representation of the knowledge covered in the environment. To facilitate intensive procedural activities, the Workers' World provides an activity environment for students. The activity environment has basically five components: (a) Activity Center; (b) Activity Set; (c) Activity Handling Tools (objects and operators); (d) Student Records; and (e) Interface.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

The Activity Center consists of tasks authored either by the classroom teacher or by other teachers but customized by the teacher. Number and type of activities for a particular group of students are determined by the class teacher in accordance with the students' learning profiles and requirements. The classroom teacher will prepare a set of activities and pre-store them for students' use. Activity sets may be different for different students, student groups or classrooms: An activity set will be entirely tailored to students' needs pinpointed by the human teacher. The student activity environment also provides tools to handle and complete activity sets. Activity handling tools in the Workers' World consider representation of the study domain. Hence it will be a domain representation environment, which represents two basic components as screen objects, namely objects and operators. The objects, prescribed in a given activity, are workers and/or trolley and masses, are represented graphically. The operators are work-meter and road, and are intended for proceduralization of the given task. Once a trolley with or without a specified mass is pushed by a worker on a given road (distance to be specified), a particular amount of work would be produced, measured and represented in the work-meter.

All these arrangements will support "making the goal of the user and representation of procedure by the learning environment close" (Schneiderman, 1998). In turn, the user will make a ready transition from his/her planned action into his/her instructions to the environment. Further, the environment makes the results of each user action visible and interpretable. It will also be able to control the users' attention in order to accommodate exploratory and directed mode of interaction.

In Workers'-World, the interface consists of three different segments (A task presentation segment, Task objects and operators, A Work-Meter) for students to check activities (Figure 2): The task objects together with the operator will require students to analyze the given task, to find out what to do with the provided objects and to proceduralize the given task. A presented task may be accomplished typically by the following procedures: (a) selecting workers and/or a weight; (b) dragging and dropping selected objects one-by-one at the back (or top) of the trolley on the distance, (c) executing the push action to the trolley; and (d) observing the push action and reading and noting the work-meter values. The procedure that students may wish to undertake is to apply a force on an object and to measure the quantity of the force. The sequence of operations would be monitored by the environment. They function as components of procedural language which is controlling interactions between the student and the Workers' World environment.

CURRICULUM AUTHORING CENTER FOR TEACHERS

To enhance active learning, the learning environment should provide different types of tasks. These tasks can be specified and managed through a Curriculum Authoring Center (CAC). The CAC, lesson office for teachers, will allow the learning to be contextualized and procedural in its instructional approach. It will also be capable of setting to the task needs of a teacher who will utilize his/her experiences with students' learning of the domain and from previous student records to author a lesson for a particular group of students. Such data exchange is needed to provide students with a set of learning activities and teachers with students' data. The CAC will exchange data with other facilities to take more student data (records) into account in the task presentation in activity space and in course authoring. A teacher can use the provided activity specification tools to prepare eight different modes of studying work. The number and order of activities would depend on the teachers. Hence, the teachers will need a set of easy-to-use activity specification tools. The Workers'-World Learning Environment enables a dynamic and visible authoring center with the following Activity Specification Tools (see Figure 3):

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

1) A text editor

2) A task ordering unit

3) A screen object management unit

3.1) Worker management

3.2) Masses & Weights management

3.3) Labeling management

3.4) Work management

3.5) Feedback management

3.6) Screen layout management

4) A task set management

4.1) Task selection

4.2) Task browsing (downloading)

4.3) Task landing (uploading)

Teacher-tool interaction in the environment is managed through a direct manipulation type of interface. A teacher can write up tasks in contexts and select order of tasks, workers, weight-objects, force, and students' screen layout through drag and drop activities. Insertion, deletion, extraction, and saving of text, numbers and screen objects may be handled in the CAC. A single task or a set of tasks can be created in the lesson office or imported from the global activity center. Each instructional screen object in the CAC has the same fundamental properties. When an activity (task) is viewed by a learner, certain objects will be visible or invisible: Visibility conditions are set by the teachers. For example, whether a student should be allowed to modify the property of the road traveled by the worker in a given situation is adjusted prior to task presentation. Activities prescribed in the lesson office form the instructional curriculum for a particular group of students. The learners must manage this curriculum in an intensive interactive manner. The task (activity) specification managed through the interface of the lesson office by the teacher must be able to support tasks that are exploratory in nature or more directive in their presentation. The sequence of different mode of activities is to provide scaffolding where subsequent task relates to the students' previous experience. Further, help or procedural hints and feedback should be attached to a particular activity. For each activity, the lesson office places its prescription on a screen that permits tagging of the problem, including text describing the problem context and guidance to the learner. The answers are also given to the system and the teacher can provide interpretation and overall task feedback by using the response component. Hence, such flexibility in the environment will allow for use with individual learners, small group demonstrations, or paired studying as determined by the classroom teacher.

[FIGURE 3 OMITTED]

GLOBAL ACTIVITY CENTER AND TEACHER COLLABORATION TOOLS

In conventional learning environments, a teacher plays an important role in determining what and how students learn through activities. Teachers are responsible for monitoring the flow of each student's activities, playing a meta-cognitive function for the students by probing their knowledge and reasoning, monitoring participation, and student engagement. Student activities must be rich and need-based so that teachers make their educational diagnosis and intervention accordingly. As student needs vary and those needs may be fulfilled with different task regimes, it would be important for teachers to have access to a large activity pool which is constructed and enriched by teachers. The Workers' World accommodates such an activity pool managed within a Global Activity Center.

Because the Internet provides a means of easy communication and information exchange platform, teachers can collaborate to construct and tailor tasks, based upon their students' performance records. A set of online tools and resources support teachers as they, in turn, support the students through activities. This set of online resources outline a suggested sequence of activities based on what has worked in the past; each activity listed is linked to additional information regarding the purpose of the given activity, an elaboration of what the activity entails, and tips for when to intervene. It also provides a teacher with practical strategies for how to guide students' work. To accomplish these functionalities and to make them an Internet communication medium, this study constructed a three-module collaborative work platform for teachers: Global Task Pool, Experience Repository, and Learner Record Repository.

Global task pool (GTP). It is a database of tasks prepared by teachers and uploaded to the system. It contains tasks, objects of tasks, operators to be used for tackling each task, prompt for each task and level of students for whom tasks could be used. Each submitted task may be associated with a series of other tasks, hence allowing the prescription of a task space for a (group of) student(s). Teachers can comment on tasks and share those comments. The task pool would be enriched (Figure 4) by contributions of other teachers. Critique of and suggestions about a particular task or task regime would enable teachers to work with better quality tasks, constructly validated by colleagues. An important characteristic of study tasks which are used in this type of learning and teaching environment is the authenticity of the activity. Teachers' collaboration will help produce more authentic activities and GTP will store them for further usage.

[FIGURE 4 OMITTED]

Learner record repository. One of the benefits of computational learning environment is to keep record of students' performances in a given learning activity. When those performance records are taken into account in developing new or altered activities, the learning environment is more likely to respond to students' needs. When teachers customize learning activities, they can refer to students' records provided by other teachers from different school(s) in the same or different regions, and have an idea of similar students' behaviors over a series of tasks. Such learners' record repository would be more helpful to teachers when the records contain information about students' learning difficulties and teachers' experiences about overcoming those difficulties and information about student reactions.

Experience repository. The Global Task Pool provides teachers with a set of tools to share their experiences about student reactions to a task or task regime. Once a teacher uploads his/her tasks used in a classroom to the GTP, the teacher may also share his/her experiences and observations about the students' performances and learning outcomes. These could be the result of comprehensive analyses of particular students' learning process of work or an informal description of learner-task interaction. Further, the experience repository can store information about students' task manipulation and learning styles, actions after an activity, the type of intervention they needed, and the type of additional help they required.

Fast communication means of the Internet may help form an activity building community. Then, colleagues can share a rich learners' profile and a large number of authentic tasks. The success of GAC to a large extent depends on the quality of teachers' communication. The design of the GAC should encourage participant teachers to engage in developing meaningful practices through collaborative processes. The GAC will develop a climate where commenting on each others' work and giving and receiving feedback are integrated and routine part of the collaborators' work.

IMPLEMENTATION AND EVALUATION OF THE WORKERS'-WORLD ENVIRONMENT

The entire teaching and learning environment was developed in different applications: The Student Activity Environment and the Curriculum Authoring Center were constructed using Macromedia Flash. The Global Activity Center and teacher collaboration tools were constructed with Microsoft .net platform because the GAC needs database relations and other server-side requirements. The first two systems consist of main functions and objects which control their operations. The system also works with an XML database. All the data shown to the user is extracted from the xml file with "isle" function, the file will then be parsed to the data resource, and the whole data are copied to an array written in ActionScript code. Flash platform aids with the main Keyframe construction and its definition of functions. "Execution_OK," "Ask_Task," "Event_Time," and "Save_Act" are the main functions of the learning environment and are defined on the main Keyframe. For example, each task is derived from the data array through Ask_Task function.

Sample

To evaluate the effects of the system facilities for students' learning, a pilot evaluation was carried out with 69 seventh grade students (35 male and 34 female; average age is 14) from four different secondary schools. Four different groups of students were randomly assigned to the two task regimes. The first task regime group consisted of 39 students (20 male and 19 female) and the second task regime group consisted of 30 students (15 male and 15 female). In addition, four science teachers from four different schools participated in the study.

Procedure

In the evaluation study, particular attention was paid to the effect of different task regimes. Prior to the experiment with the students, the teachers met in the researchers' office and received a two hours of training about the study, how to use the Workers' World environment online and offline, CAC, and other facilities of the software set. They were also asked to select an online partner from among other teachers to prepare a task regime for the Workers' World. They were then instructed to prepare tasks in all modes of the software in use. One pair of teachers was instructed to author a task regime with items requiring qualitative thinking and worksheet support. The other pair was intructed to author a task regime with different tasks. Two different task regimes were prepared in the CAC by the teachers in two weeks time and checked by the researchers. The first task regime used only the courseware facilities, the second task regime with more qualitative items used a worksheet as a support material to the courseware facilities. In the first task regime, there were ten tasks; six of them were in essay format, three were in multiple-choice format and one was in fill-in-the blank format. The first nine tasks required employing the given software facilities for the students to solve and to proceed. The final task, fill-in-the blank, required to form the formula of work problems using the given variables. The second task regime, however, had tasks more qualitative in nature. This task regime had nine tasks; six in essay format, two in multiple-choice format and the final one was in fill-in-the blank format.

A pretest and a posttest, both in multiple choice format, were prepared to measure student progress after using the learning unit. Each test contained items on the basis of the lesson objectives as to describe the relationships between; force and work, distance and work; force, distance and work; masses and work; and as to derive the formula for solving work problems. The two task regimes in the Workers' World environment were then administered to the assigned groups. The pre and posttests and the treatment took place in computer laboratories of the schools from which the sample was drawn. Four sessions (two for each task regime) were organised. In both task regime treatments, prior to the treatment, the pretest was administered in ten minutes. Just after the pretest, the researchers explained the sample how the software facilities to be handled. Then the students were allowed to study the task regimes for an hour. Although an hour was allocated to the study of task regimes, the second task regime was studied in about 40 minutes on average. The students had to finish all of the tasks correctly by using the software facilities, even when a student predicted the answer. Therefore, all students completed all tasks in both task regimes. During the study of task regimes, no help to find the correct answer was provided. One of the researchers and one of the teachers (class teacher who was a member of task authoring group) were present during the treatments. Following the task regimes, all students were given a paper and pencil posttest similar to the pretest.

In addition to the teachers' observations of the treatments, the data for the study was the pre and posttest results shown in Table 1. To see whether there is any significant difference between the students who studied the first and second task regimes, a t-test was conducted (Table 2).

The data representing the samples' pre/posttest scores differences was indicated as mean difference in Table 2. It was found that there was a significant difference ([t.sub.(2.084, 67)] = 0.043, p<0.05) between seventh graders' achievement in "work learning unit" studied through Workers-World CBL environment with worksheet support and without worksheet support. It appears that both task regimes interacted with students' learning; however the first task regime helped students more than the second task regime with a worksheet. This should not be interpreted as simply the CBL facilities are sufficient to learn the work unit, but it points to the fact that the varied use of facilities and customization of facilities to the students are important.

Following the study, the researchers met the teachers who collaboratively authored the task regimes, and the results of the study were shared with them. The teachers' comments on the sample students' progress were positive but they pointed out that the students should be exposed to more number of both qualitative and quantitative learning tasks in a period of time longer than the study allocated. One of the teachers strongly stressed that the sequence of tasks and the number of introductory tasks used should be reconsidered. Another teacher emphasized that the children's general study and learning behavior is more teacher centered, and therefore students should be assisted in reflecting on their manipulation of the system tools, suggesting teacher involvement to the software facilities. The idea of collaboration with other teachers was found interesting and useful. Information exchange and discussion specific to a learning task was found more useful than discussion lists based on general domains such as science education, where many teachers state their opinions and raise issues that generally result in superficial discussions. It was noted that thorough discussions specific to a learning task may be systematized through tools similar to the Workers' World. All teachers in the study agreed that with common usage of the designed systems:

* Teachers would easily prepare daily activities for students with specific needs.

* Through more focused discussions and consultations, students' persistent learning difficulties may be addressed.

* Richer task regimes and lesson plans may be obtained.

* Teachers would save time through available task regimes or by adapting them to their preferred teaching styles.

* Teachers can select appropriate examples or explanations according to the students' needs and feedback.

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS

The findings demonstrate that both task regimes have effects on students' learning; however the first task regime helped students more. In the first task regime, the students studied the first and second tasks to relate a force to "work" in a given construction-site work by measuring the workers' forces. The third task aimed to reveal direct proportionality between force and work concepts; the students observed that workers' forces are directly related with their work. The ratio relation between workers and their forces was studied in the fourth task where one to one correspondence between the variables was established by the students. The fifth task focused on work and distance relationship; to simplify the world only one worker, force, was given and the students had to fill out a distance-work table. Similarly, the sixth task required comparing different work values on different distances and the students completed a distance-time table. Further, the seventh task enhanced matching force, work and distance relations. The eighth and ninth task focused on the effect of mass on work, showing that machines simply transform the form of the work we do. In the ninth task, a worker had to carry 3, 5, and 12 kg masses with the help of the trolley. The students measured the work, then had to fill in the table cells with these measurements. All required cell results were 350 Joule. Converting the relationship between the variables into an abstraction, building the equation, was studied in the last task where force, work, distance, and arithmetic symbols of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division as well as the equal sign were given. In this task, if students requested, the work mechanism was also visible.

Although the sample's progress from pretest to posttest is small, the software facilities appear, to a certain extent, to help students overcome learning difficulties and contribute to students' learning. The Workers' World facilities allowed students to visualize the relations between force and work, also helped most students to see that machines simply transform the work that we do. The students identified patterns of distance, force, work, and mass within the environment. They further formulated the relationship between the variables. If the teachers benefited from an experience repository, a learners' record repository, and a task pool, they may have prepared different task regimes, which may help students more.

The Workers' World facilities were used by the students on an individual basis and on a limited time period. For this reason, the students' communication and disposition of inquiry in classroom discourse was not possible. The only interaction students participated in was with the courseware facilities for about 10 tasks. This may be a drawback of the study, however, it appears that the software facilities used even in a short period provided students with new ways of reasoning and various sense making tools. The teachers found the data encouraging that once students used the facilities and engaged in reflective and critical activities, based on the Workers-World, with other students and the teacher in the class, conceptual understanding of the work learning unit would be more enhanced and problem solving would be further supported. The progress in students' scores from the pretest to the posttest and the two different results for the two different task regimes show that varying task regimes should be employed to help learning. In addition, the tools such as student-record repository and activity center enable developing the most appropriate task regimes for particular group of students.

The collaborative communities provide opportunities for teachers to reflect deeply and critically on their own teaching practice on the content they teach and on the experiences and backgrounds of the learners in their classrooms (Putnam & Borko, 1997, p. 1247). Briscoe and Peters' (1997, p. 61) findings further indicated that "collaboration facilitates change on teachers because it provides opportunities for teachers to learn both content and pedagogical knowledge from one another, encourages teachers to be risk takers in implementing new ideas, and supports and sustains the processes of individual change in science teaching." The teacher tools designed in this study may serve the purpose as shown by Jauhiainen, Lavonen, Koponen, & Kurki-Suonio (2002) who reported that the courses and activities that were most valuable for day-to-day teaching were those where teachers could cooperate, reflect, and plan with each other in small groups.

In a recent and more comprehensive analysis of the teacher networks, Zhao and Rop (2001) reported that the teacher networks were claimed to have a number of positive effects on their participants such as reduced teacher isolation, enabled curriculum development, facilitated dissemination of information, and provided easy access to curricular materials. To enable teachers to use computer mediated communication (CMC), this study showed again that not only general purpose tools such as e-mail and discussion lists, but also content specific, tailorable, and flexible courseware may be designed. Tools similar to Workers' World would develop teacher reflective discourse communities, because the real value of CMC may lie in information sharing around a set of materials and sharing student data which could be the focus of discussion and reflections. When similar student-facilities specific to learning tasks increase in number and quality, teachers may then enrich their reflective discourse in different learning units of varying content areas.

The study developed, implemented, and evaluated a set of software environments with Student Activity Environment, Curriculum Authoring Center, Teacher Collaboration Tools, and Global Activity Center. These components were built according to the recommendations of previous studies for collaboratively set learning environments. The studies with students and teachers validated the approach. However, the student activity environment may be extended with new task models. The models may include script flexibility for expert teachers or programmers. The system may support external objects with predefined standards (e.g., SCORM complaint), and include a learning object or other multimedia object as video segments, pictures, or animations. Possible external objects may include updates or support for other learning units. They may also be linked to a new science unit. In this sense, the student activity environment may be used for only its core functions such as student record repository, learning object adaptivity, portability, and feedback mechanism. The feedback in the student activity environment may be changed in several ways: If there is more than one type, it should be under teacher control. Further studies should investigate the different usage of the facilities and extensions. Prime interest in that research is to collect data at the operational level (e.g., to what extend are students and teachers able to use the system and do the facilities motivate them?) and at a reflection level (e.g., is the learning environment encouraging tactical thinking?) so that meta-cognitive and problem-solving skills can become part of the learning objectives.

Teacher collaboration tools should further be studied to increase experience sharing among teachers in terms of similar activity center applications. Teacher actions in the center may be observed for further expansions of the system. The collaboration tools may be strengthened with the new online messaging tools. Task regimes and worksheets may be adapted for collaborative learning strategies to increase efficiency of the learning gains.

Most collaborative learning technology focuses on the learner, but teacher practices must also be considered in the design of technology for schools. This project reveals ways in which the development of collaborative computing can help teachers not only prepare for the networked classrooms of tomorrow but also address and provide content specific tools for teachers.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank two anonymous reviewers and Gunizi Kertel for comments on earlier drafts of this article.

YAVUZ AKPINAR AND VOLKAN BAL 

Bogazici University, Turkey

[e-mail]

Table 1 Pre and Posttest Data

                                 Pretest
                        Pretest  Standard   Posttest  Posttest Standard
                    n   Mean     Deviation  Mean      Deviation

First task regime   39  1,690    1,3030     2,370     1,238
Second task regime  30  2,135    1,0845     2,200     1,288

Table 2 Pre and Posttest Mean Differences

                                                              Standard
                     n   Mean Difference  Standard Deviation  Error Mean

First task regime:   39  ,68              1,28050             ,20504
Without worksheet
Second task regime:  30  ,065             1,20153             ,21937
With Worksheet