Individual essay writing is a common learning method at the university but increasingly students write texts collaboratively in order to learn subject contents. Studies of individual writing have shown that writing has an effect on writer’s knowledge construction and cognitive development (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1987; Tynjälä, 1997; Klein, 1999; Mason & Boscolo, 2000). By definition collaborative writing is a specific learning task where two or more learners construct and write a text together, participate equally in the production of the text, and are equally responsible for achieving the task (Giroud, 1999).

Collaborative writing involves both social interaction and mutual engagement in the writing process. Collaborative writers must share a feeling of joint responsibility to advance mutual understanding of the topic in question and all participants should contribute to solving of the writing task. The members of the group should also be willing to share their knowledge and skills to make their learning processes more meaningful and productive both for themselves and others (Erkens et al., 2005; Yong, 2010). Expressing thoughts and ideas to other students as well as completing other partner’s ideas, can promote knowledge construction.

The benefit of collaborative writing is that it combines social processes of writing with cognitive knowledge construction processes which may lead to deeper learning than individual work. Working and writing together enables students to utilize each others as a source of information, to share knowledge and to construct mutual meaning through interaction. Although in face-to-face situations interaction is an inevitable part of group work, placing writers to work together in a group does ensure neither collaboration (Kreijns et al., 2003), nor knowledge construction. Therefore, encouragement to real collaboration and knowledge construction should be structured within the group work (Kreijns et al., 2003). To achieve the advantages which collaborative writing can offer, it is important to develop methods of supporting collaborative writing among students. The aim of this study is to clarify what kind of knowledge construction processes students are engaged in when they write collaboratively a joint essay.

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