Towards Tool Support for Team Awareness in Collaborative Argumentation

Supporting collaborative argumentation in higher education is a challenging task, and raising the awareness of students on the relational space of their collaboration may be the key to simplifying it. In this paper, we explore the role of team awareness for enhancing the quality of collaborative argumentation. Ten groups of master students from Media Informatics (n= 28) participated in a multiple-case study for arguing on illstructured problems where they received different team awareness prompts embedded in collaboration scripts, argued for solving the problems and built argument maps. The initial analysis of the argument maps indicates that the social awareness script has a moderately higher impact on the quality of argumentation compared to the behavioural awareness script.