Bodong Chen, assistant professor of LT, attended the 11th International Conference on Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL2015) held in Gothenburg, Sweden. As a bi-annual conference sponsored by the International Society of Learning Sciences, CSCL focuses on issues related to learning through collaboration and productive collaborative discourse with the help of the computer and other communications technologies. Every year it attracts participation from hundreds of learning scientists, cognitive psychologists, computer scientists, and designers from around the world.

Chen's paper, entitled "The Development of Productive Vocabulary in Knowledge Building", reports on a longitudinal study of elementary students' development of productive vocabulary over six years of collaborative knowledge building using a tool called Knowledge Forum. This study was conducted in collaboration with his colleagues from Canada and Japan, using a rich set of discourse data from Knowledge Forum. This paper is one of the rare longitudinal studies in the field of CSCL and was among the five Best Paper Award nominees at this year's conference. For details, you could find his paper in the conference proceedings:

Chen, B., Ma, L., Matsuzawa, Y., & Scardamalia, M. (2015). The Development of Productive Vocabulary in Knowledge Building: A Longitudinal Study. In O. Lindwall, P. Hakkinen, T. Koschman, P. Tchounikine, & S. Ludvigsen. (Eds.), Exploring the Material Conditions of Learning: The Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) Conference 2015, Volume 1 (pp. 443-450). Gothenburg, Sweden: The International Society of the Learning Sciences.

Besides presenting his paper, Chen also participated in the NSF-funded Early Career Workshop organized for junior faculty and new PhDs.