The impact of CSCL beyond the online environment

Abstract

Accountable Talk is a form of classroom interaction that positions students as thinkers in interaction and encourages students to make their thinking visible for collaborative reasoning. This paper reports on a two-year teacher professional development program in which teachers were coached to use Accountable Talk practices in their classrooms. Online collaborative learning activities were used to prepare students for these whole-class, teacher lead discussions using the same paradigm. Findings from a series of studies embedded within the two year professional development program provides evidence that novel conversational agent designs, based on the Accountable Talk approach to discussion facilitation, improve learning during the online exercises and better prepare students to benefit from whole class discussions. In this paper we evaluate the effect on teacher uptake of Accountable Talk practices when their students have participated in these online small group activities. © ISLS.