CSCL Scripts - Effects of Social and Epistemic Scripts on Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning

Most modern approaches to learning and instruction - and approach­es to computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) in particular - foresee collaboration on complex problems to facilitate individual con­struction of multi-perspective application-related knowledge. Lear­ners are often overwhelmed by working on complex problems how­ever and rather aim towards satisficing minimal requirements of a learning task. Therefore CSCL needs to be scaffolded for learners to actually interact and work on problems together in a way which is effectively facilitating individual knowledge construction. CSCL scripts pose an approach to directly facilitate specific processes of collabo­rative knowledge construction. The question under investigation here is what kind of processes should be supported by such CSCL scripts social or epistemic processes or both?