COLLABORATIVE PRACTICE OF SCIENCE CONSTRUCTION IN A COMPUTER-BASED MULTIMEDIA ENVIRONMENT

This paper discusses a case study of nine-pairs working collaborativel y in a multimedia CDROM science environment. The main goal of the stud y was to investigate the ways in which the collaborative use of a mult imedia-based encyclopaedia can foster science learning. By focusing on pupils' discursive, cognitive and collaborative activities, the study highlights pupils' information handling and knowledge construction in the multimedia context. Also the pupils' developing understanding of the science concepts dealt with in the tasks are considered. The resea rch data consist of video and audio recordings, interviews, questionna ires and field notes collected from one 6th grade primary classroom. T he results show that the pupils' activities during task-processing wer e highly procedural and product-oriented. The nature of the activity w as also reflected in the pupils' poster displays indicating rather sur face-level and incoherent understanding of the science concepts. The p upils were also found to have inefficient skills in accessing and retr ieving information from the multimedia software. Although the findings are strongly linked with the nature of the collaborative task designe d around the multimedia context and with the sociocultural background of the pupils, the study illuminates common problems related to the us e of multimedia-based CD-ROMs in learning and points out aspects which need to be considered in order to make collaborative learning more ef fective in multimedia environments. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.