The Practice of Rationale Sharing in Virtual Group Learning Activities: An Empirical Study

There is lack of understanding of how members prefer to organize and represent the shared rationales. In this paper, I report a classroom study about how group learners used a shared rationale space to articulate and share their rationales. The findings of the investigation show that: group members would brainstorm the ideas and generate rationales to justify the ideas before reading the others´ ideas and rationales, the members in general brainstormed all the ideas first and then elaborated the rationales to justify the ideas, and the members grouped the shared rationales according to their authors. These findings suggest that the WYSIWIS model is not applicable to support rationale articulation and generation in a virtual group workspace. Instead, an adaptive intelligent group user interface is needed to facilitate the involved associative thinking and deeper thinking processes.