Iris Tabak

Incorporating data visualizations into college classrooms can enhance disciplinary learning, when accompanied by associated meaning-making practices. However, tools not specifically designed for CSCL may lack supports for collaboration and disciplinary reasoning. Therefore, it is necessary to design supports into classroom orchestration. In this paper we examine the design of such orchestration to scaffold historical reasoning with geospatial data visualizations. The orchestration of a sequence of small-group tasks scaffolded progressively more complex reasoning about historical waves of immigration, which the instructor leveraged to support students’ reasoning at multiple levels in whole-class discussion. Our analyses point to these kinds of orchestrated scaffolds as a valuable direction for CSCL research and design.