Children’s reflection-in-action during collaborative design-based learning

Supporting children’s reflection-in-action during Design-based Learning (DBL) processes can help children them make sense of their design activities and optimize their action on the spot. Prior work has not examined the pro-cess in a way to inform detailed design decisions for scaffolding. In addition, the social character of reflection-in-action is underappreciated in previous work. In this paper, we begin with building a conceptual framework. We identify four elements that define the process of reflection-in-action: surpris-ing event, knowing-in-action, improvisation to respond surprise, effects on ongoing action. We describe a qualitative study that examined how these el-ements of reflection-in-action are manifested themselves during a collabora-tive DBL workshop with 9 children. Our study uncovereds six types of re-flective discourses and shows how these on-the-spot reflections can affect subsequent group behaviours. Based on our results, we discuss the social process of reflection-in-action, the problems revealed and design require-ments to design technological reflection scaffolds in a collaborative DBL context