Online discussions have become inherent components of both face-to-face and distance education college courses, yet they often fail to provide much benefit to students' learning outcomes. One reason behind this phenomenon is the lack of or inadequate scaffolding or guidance provided to students when participating on asynchronous discussion boards. Although some existing tools and strategies may encourage meaningful academic discussions by eliciting conflict among students, scientific concepts do not always lend themselves to such discourse. Instead, collaborative activities in the area of science need to incorporate the co-critiquing of a flawed external source, with appropriate scaffolding to also benefit students with low self-regulation levels by mediating cognitive and metacognitive processes. The authors designed and tested such a tool, termed Collaborative Misconception Mapping (CMM), which combines the positive effects of concept mapping and the Questioning the Author comprehension strategy. Compared with a discussion-questions based online activity, the use of the online CMM strategy lead to more meaningful discussions, as well as increased knowledge of basic statistical concepts.