This research presents a case study of nine 12th grade students from a high school in the center
of Israel. As the aim of this study is to understand the nature of students’ collaborative learning,
this design was considered appropriate as it would allow for the tracking of selected students
over a period of nine months. Furthermore, a focus on a few target students, instead of a large
sample of students, enabled us to obtain rich, in-depth data from many collaborative discourses
in small-group settings, allowing for a subsequent fine-grained analysis. Because we have
selected these nine students, our form of case study will be a collective (multiple cases),
instrumental (cases identified to help illuminate a problem) case study.