A collaborative script is a pedagogical scenario that students have to follow when they learn together. Instead of free collaboration, a script structures the collaboration process e.g. by prescribing different activities or by instructing how to form the group. Some of these activities are computer-based, some are not.

A collaboration script (O'Donnell & Dansereau, 1992) is a set of instructions regarding to how the group members should interact, how they should collaborate and how they should solve the problem.

A script is a story or scenario that the students and tutors have to play as actors play a movie script.

ConceptGrid is a sub-class of the JIGSAW scripts (Aronson et al. 1978). Team members acquire complementary knowledge by reading different papers. The concept grid can only be constructed when each member explains the concepts about which he/she has individually read.

1. Group:The group distributes the roles among its members. Each role is associated with a few papers to read.
2. Individual: Each student reads the papers associated with his or her role.
3. Group: The group distributes the concepts to be defined among its members.
4. Individual: Each student enters a 5-10-line definition of the concepts (s)he has been assigned.
5. Group: The group constructs a concept grid, i.e. concepts are ordered on a map in such a way that two neighbouring concepts can be explained in just a few sentences.
6. Class: This debriefing session aims to reformulate the definitions and relations provided by the students, to structure them and to integrate them into a theoretical framework.

The conflict schema triggers argumentation among group members by forming pairs with student with conflicting opinions (e.g. ArgueGraph), by providing them with conflicting evidence or by asking them to play conflicting roles.

The Jigsaw schema build upon the partition of the knowledge or information necessary to solve the task, either by forming pairs who have complementary knowledge (Hoppe & Ploetzner, 1999) or by providing them with complementary information or by asking them to play complementary roles. The design principle is that no learner has the necessary information/knowledge to solve the problem aloe. It can only be achieve through intense interaction with the other team members.

We introduced the notion of script granularity as a continuous variable. There is however a qualitative difference between macro and micro scripts. Let us illustrate these differences with scripts that aim at raising argumentation. A micro-script scaffolds the interaction process per se: when learners state a hypothesis, the script will for instance prompt their peer to produce counter-evidence. A macro-script sets up pairs in which argumentation should occur, as in the ArgueGraph, by pairing students with opposite opinions. The micro-script reflects a psychological perspective, acting on the internal script (scripting as a goal), while the macro-script reflects an educational perspective, influencing the process more indirectly (scripting as a method).

Macro-scripts are pedagogical models, i.e. they model a sequence of activities [...] to be performed by groups. For instance, argumentation can be triggered by collecting students’ opinions and pairing students with conflicting opinions.

The terms micro/macro refer to the granularity of the prescribed actions: a four-second turn of dialogue in micro-scripts versus a 4-h task in macro-scripts. A more important difference between micro and macro scripts is the fact that, in contrast to pedagogical models (macro scripts), dialogue models (micro scripts) are expected to be internalized.

Coarse-grained scripts that aim at creating learning situations within which the desired interactions between students should occur.

We introduced the notion of script granularity as a continuous variable. There is however a qualitative difference between macro and micro scripts. Let us illustrate these differences with scripts that aim at raising argumentation. A micro-script scaffolds the interaction process per se: when learners state a hypothesis, the script will for instance prompt their peer to produce counter-evidence. A macro-script sets up pairs in which argumentation should occur, as in the ArgueGraph, by pairing students with opposite opinions. The micro-script reflects a psychological perspective, acting on the internal script (scripting as a goal), while the macro-script reflects an educational perspective, influencing the process more indirectly (scripting as a method).

The terms micro/macro refer to the granularity of the prescribed actions: a four-second turn of dialogue in micro-scripts versus a 4-h task in macro-scripts. A more important difference between micro and macro scripts is the fact that, in contrast to pedagogical models (macro scripts), dialogue models (micro scripts) are expected to be internalized.

Micro-scripts are dialogue models, mostly argumentation models, which are embedded in the environment [...] and which students are expected to adopt and progressively internalize. For instance, a micro-script may prompt a student to respond to the argument of a fellow student with a counter-argument (Weinberger et al. 2002).

Finer-grained scripts that follow a more psychological approach and emphasize the activities of individual learners.

Problem-based learning (Koschmann, Kelson, Feltovich, & Barrows, 1996) covers a variety of scripts that, despite differences, include similar phases: analysing the problem, defining learning objectives, acquiring the necessary knowledge and solving the problem collectively

The reciprocal schema defines two roles in teams, one of the peers regulating the other and then switching roles.