Designing for Children’s Reflections in Collaborative Interaction Mediated by Technology: A Systematic Literature Review

Journal article, 2021

Reflection is an integral part of collaborative interaction. However, we know little about how to design for reflection in collaborative activities mediated by technologies. This systematic literature review focuses on children’s reflections within the collaborative practices in child-computer interaction research and investigates (1) the link between reflection and collaborative activities, (2) the types of collaborative technologies to scaffold reflection, and (3) the methodological approaches to analyze reflection. We searched the ACM Digital Library, Scopus and ProQuest which resulted in 141 papers that make the link between terms ‘reflection’ and ‘collaboration’ explicit, where only 13 of these involve children as the primary actors of reflection. The results show that this topic is increasingly gaining attention, however, the link between reflection and collaborative interaction remains underdeveloped. The contribution of this study is to provide a theoretical and methodological basis to understand, analyze and support children’s reflections within a collaborative activity through technology.