ABSTRACT
There are many documented efforts of designers creating community environments to enable improved student learning. Many of these efforts involve giving students the opportunity to participate in interesting settings with novel, educationally beneficial roles. Sometimes, these roles can be complex, and students can find themselves without the social skills to participate effectively. When widespread, social deficiencies can interfere with the functioning of a learning environment, and reduce the overall effectiveness of the environment for promoting student learning. While many successful learning community designs have been documented, there is not a lot of literature discussing what to do to strengthen weak implementations. This paper attempts to contribute to the literature by describing the effect of one approach to addressing this kind of problem, It describes the design and outcomes of an intervention to strengthen a sub-optimally functioning learning community by promoting social skill development.
