Peer discussions are increasingly seen as appropriate instructional means in
formal and informal educational settings. The basic idea is that of argumentative
knowledge construction: By formulating and exchanging arguments in a controversial
discussion, concepts to be learned will be elaborated both on a social level
and on an individual cognitive level. However, students often lack or do not
use the necessary knowledge and skills on how to discuss productively, i.e.
how to engage in argumentative knowledge construction. Collaboration script
approaches are seen as appropriate instructional means to overcome this problem.
Collaboration scripts assign roles to individuals, facilitate the associated
role activities, and coordinate the interaction. Computer-supported collaboration
scripts can be designed to facilitate argumentative knowledge construction
by a broad scope of features reaching from just prompting learners' appropriate
knowledge on specific roles within a discussion to scaffolding every single
step in argument formulation by sentence starters. Scripts can address different
dimensions of a discussion, most importantly the content, the interaction,
the formal structure of arguments. In a series of lab and field studies, we
analyzed, how peer discussions in secondary and in higher education can be
promoted by different kinds of computer-supported collaboration scripts. This
talk gives an overview of these studies focusing on innovative contributions
to methodology (e.g. knowledge convergence analyses or think-aloud protocols
during collaboration) as well as on major findings.