Fostering online search competence and domain-specific knowledge in inquiry classrooms: effects of continuous and fading collaboration scripts

Collaborative inquiry learning can be regarded as a fruitful approach to foster students' scientific literacy for participation in societal debates involving scientific issues. In a four-week field study in biology with 131 ninth-grade students from six classrooms distributed over three experimental conditions, we investigated the effects of a continuous and a fading collaboration script for collaborative online search compared to unsupported collaboration on students' online search competence and domain-specific knowledge. Findings indicate a superiority of a continuous collaboration script compared to unsupported collaboration with respect to both students' online search competence and domain-specific knowledge, whereas the fading collaboration script had a significant positive effect compared to unsupported collaboration only with respect to students' online search competence. These findings extend our knowledge from laboratory research on effects of collaboration scripts on domain-general competences and domain-specific knowledge.