Leveraging digital communities of practice: How asynchronous digital collaboration afforded a complex reading/writing dialogue for secondary school students

This dissertation examines a case study of a research unit taught to secondary school students with the inclusion of an asynchronous digital collaboration with college students. Over consecutive school years, two classes of high school seniors and two classes of college students, despite being geographically separated by more than 90 miles, worked together in multiple reading and writing exchanges within an online community as they read a primary text and as the secondary school students wrote research papers. This study seeks to understand the effects of this unit on the secondary school students' thinking, reading, and writing skills, focusing specifically on the inclusion of an authentic, responsive audience and the affordances of pedagogically-driven technology integration in the classroom.