Escritura colaborativa en línea para la elaboración del género de discurso "informe de resolución de problemas"

Abstract

Online collaborative writing in the application of Problem-Based Learning (PBL) methodology has been little studied. Frequently, specialised research in the area reports on the benefits that this active method offers for the acquisition of in-depth knowledge, but there is less research that addresses the solidarity components of teamwork developed digitally and the linguistic and discursive learning of the genre as a result of solving the problem posed. In this doctoral thesis three case studies are presented with the general objective of exploring the collaborative writing of the problem-solving report genre as a result of the application of the Problem-Based Learning methodology in the context of Biology: two case studies from a Spanish university and one from a Chilean university. The participants are first-year students in biology-related fields and their teachers. From the study of these cases, we offer a set of six articles that respond, on the one hand, to a representation of the most relevant profiles of the participants in online collaborative production with the aim of describing comprehensively how students write when they solve a PBL. On the other hand, we investigate the evaluation of collaborative writing from a sociocultural perspective. In this way, we manage to account for the effects that assessment produces in the regulatory processes and in the learning obtained by students when they produce collaborative writing productions. Finally, we look at the discursive features of the problem-solving report genre as a product of PBL, with the aim of understanding how teachers provide feedback on this genre in terms of its rhetorical organisation. Within this framework, this research does not seek to generalise the results, as the findings of the case studies are confined to the particular contexts in which they are situated. Overall, the results show that students use a variety of digital tools, such as office packages and online tools, and develop different flexible and supportive profiles when producing a text as a result of PBL. Moreover, although the learners acquire certain learning that obeys both disciplinary and discursive concepts and procedures, there is a need for further co-regulation of the process followed. Finally, the rhetorical organisation of the problem-solving report generates difficulties among students, which can be solved by teachers through genre modelling and dynamic and expansive feedback. The implications of these results constitute a very relevant contribution, both from a didactic point of view, to deepen PBL through collaborative writing, and from a descriptive one, to characterise in detail the genre of collaborative writing discourse analysed: the problem-solving report.