Initial structuring of online discussions to improve learning and argumentation: Incorporating students' own explanations as seed comments versus an augmented-preset approach to seeding discussions

Collaboration scripts can facilitate argumentation in online settings by grouping students with other students who have expressed differing perspectives on a discussion topic. This general scripting approach is referred to as a "conflict schema." Prior studies suggest that a specific conflict schema script known as personally-seeded discussion is more productive for students than a standard discussion format in terms of the structural quality of the resulting argumentation and participation within the discussions. The purpose of the current study involves comparing the personally-seeded script with a variant augmented-preset script to determine the relative contributions of components of the scripts in terms of (1) increasing personal engagement of the students versus optimizing of the starting seed-comments and (2) grouping students using the conflict schema approach versus random assignment of students to groups. The results suggest that engaging students in the exploration of a diverse set of preset discussion seed-comments coupled with a conflict schema approach leads to the highest gains in learning.