LEARNING TO DISCUSS LITERATURE ONLINE: WHERE TECHNOLOGY DESIGN AND INSTRUCTION INTERSECT

Computer-mediated communication (CMC) is widely expected to support rich discussion by allowing participants to proceed at their own pace and to refer as needed to the written record of what others have said. However, research has not yet established how or if participants can achieve such discussion. The problem is that users often do not attend effectively to others’ entries. The purpose of this study was to document the influence of an introduction to the design elements of Moodle Forum on secondary school students’ online discussion. Drawing upon CMC research, this investigation documented the impact of a 15-week instructional intervention designed to increase users’ explicit reference to peers’ entries in Moodle Forum discussion. Participants included twenty students in two sections of a twelfth-grade English class. Using a gradual release model, the instructional intervention introduced students to strategies for achieving compositional significance (i.e., explicit reference to another’s entry in one’s own) and convergence (i.e., explicit reference to multiple entries in one’s own). Sources of evidence included online discussion transcripts, semi-structured interviews, observational fieldnotes, and other documentary data. Descriptive analytic codes were generated both deductively and inductively and achieved inter-reader reliability. From salient codes applied to the data set, three key findings emerged. First, following instruction, participants employed strategies that resulted in entries evidencing compositional significance. As a result, their online entries were lengthier and more substantive. Second, discussion topics that invited contention proved crucial to compositional significance. Third, instruction aimed at supporting convergence in participants’ online entries was mitigated by the design of Moodle Forum and by instructional limitations. This study offers researchers and practitioners an instructional framework for assisting students to achieve compositional significance in online literature discussions. Among its implications is the need for technological and instructional refinements if users are to achieve convergence in online discussion.