All in good time: knowledge introduction, restructuring, and development of shared opinions as different stages in collaborative writing

When learners collaborate with each other in order to elaborate on a particular subject, this collaboration may be influenced by the differing perspectives the learners have on the topic. There has been very little research to date on how differing perspectives have an impact in collaboration situations in which people are supposed to form a shared opinion on a particular topic. In this study, we analyzed which stages people’s activities pass through on their way to reaching shared opinions in a collaborative writing task. We examined how dyads of secondary school students, who in a previous instructional session had dealt with differing theoretical approaches to media effects, collaborated in writing a shared text about the topic of media violence. Quantitative analysis indicated that the participants engaged in different activities at different stages of the collaboration processes: In the early stages they were predominantly engaged in introducing the knowledge that they had acquired in the previous lesson. This activity was replaced in the middle stage of the collaboration by restructuring activities. Forming and phrasing shared opinions rarely occurred until very late in the collaboration, but played the leading role in the final stage. We applied a qualitative content analysis to illustrate these different activities by presenting examples of the collaboratively written texts. In doing so, we discuss the distinct activities as well as their character and functionalities for collaboration.