The Evolution of Research On Collaborative Learning PDF
The Evolution of Research On Collaborative Learning PDF
The Evolution of Research On Collaborative Learning PDF
In E. Spada & P. Reiman (Eds) Learning in Humans and Machine: Towards an interdisciplinary learning science. (Pp. 189211). Oxford: Elsevier.
1. Introduction
For many years, theories of collaborative learning tended to focus on how
individuals function in a group. This reflected a position which was dominant
both in cognitive psychology and in artificial intelligence in the 1970s and
early 1980s, where cognition was seen as a product of individual information
processors, and where the context of social interaction was seen more as a
background for individual activity than as a focus of research in itself. More
recently, the group itself has become the unit of analysis and the focus has
shifted to more emergent, socially constructed, properties of the interaction.
In terms of empirical research, the initial goal was to establish whether and
under what circumstances collaborative learning was more effective than
learning alone. Researchers controlled several independent variables (size of
the group, composition of the group, nature of the task, communication media,
and so on). However, these variables interacted with one another in a way that
made it almost impossible to establish causal links between the conditions and
the effects of collaboration. Hence, empirical studies have more recently
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the teachers role for some of the time and then shift roles with the other
learner. We can also distinguish empirical work according to the size of the
groups involved (dyads versus larger groups) or ways in which mediating
technologies are employed, as in computer-supported collaboration.
There are also differences between the various approaches in terms of the
research methods employed. In the socio-cognitive perspective, the
methodology was to set up conditions hypothesised to facilitate learning and
to compare the outcomes of this intervention with some control group. With
such methods, collaboration is treated as a black box; the focus is on
outcomes. In contrast, research from a socio-cultural point of view tends to
employ micro genetic analyses of the social interaction. The focus is on the
processes involved in social interaction. This is partly because of the
importance attached to the concept of mediation in socio-cultural theory.
Evidence is sought from dialogue for symbols and concepts which mediate
social activity and which can in turn be subsequently found to mediate
individual activity. The shared cognition approach obviously also favours the
second methodology.
Despite their intertwining, we have attempted to disentangle the different
research paradigms and theoretical approaches. In what follows we describe
the evolution of empirical research within three paradigms that differ with
respect to the number and the type of variables that are taken into account.
explains the first result by the fact that learning from receiving explanations is
submitted to several conditions which may not be watched by the explainer,
e.g., the fact the information must be delivered when the peer needs it, that the
peer must understand it and must have the opportunity to us to solve the
problem. The second result, the explainer's benefit, has been observed by other
scholars (Bargh and Schul, 1980). Similar effects (called the self-explanation
effect) have been observed when a learner is forced to explain an example to
himself (Chi, Bassok, Lewis, Reimann & Glaser, 1989). A computational
model of the self-explanation process have been proposed by VanLehn &
Jones (1993). The main principle is that the instantiation of general knowledge
with particular instances creates more specific knowledge, a mechanism that
has also been studied in machine learning under the label 'explanation-based
learning' (Mitchell et al., 1986). It would nevertheless be a mistake to consider
self-explanation and explanation to somebody else as identical mechanisms.
This would dramatically underestimate the role that the receiver plays in the
elaboration of the explanation. As we will see in section 5, an explanation is
not a message simply delivered by one peer to the other, but the result of joint
attempts to understand each other. Webb (1991) found that non-elaborated
help (e.g., providing the answer) is not correlated with the explainer's
performance and is negatively correlated with the explainee's performance in
the case where the explainee actually asked for a more elaborated explanation.
Webb explains these results by the fact that providing the answer while the
student is expecting an explanation does not help him or her to understand the
strategy, and may lead the explainee to infer an incorrect strategy or to lose his
or her motivation to understand the strategy.
These findings partially answer the second sub-question of this paradigm, the
relationship between categories of interaction and learning outcomes. The first
sub-question concerns the conditions in which each category of interaction is
more likely to occur. Webb (1991) reviewed several independent variables
concerning group composition, namely, the gender of group members, their
degree of introversion or extraversion and their absolute or relative expertise.
With respect to the latter, explanations are more frequent when the group is
moderately heterogeneous (high ability and medium ability students or
medium ability and low ability students) and when the group is
homogeneously composed of medium ability students. Some other group
compositions are detrimental to the quality of explanations: homogeneous
high ability students (because they assume they all know how to solve the
problem), homogeneous low ability groups (because nobody can help) and
heterogeneous groups comprising high, medium and low ability (because
medium ability students seem to be almost excluded from interactions).
Verba and Winnykamen (1992) studied the relationship between categories of
interactions and two independent variables: the general level of ability and the
specific level of expertise. In pairs where the high ability child was the domain
expert and the low ability child the novice, the interaction was characterised
by tutoring or guidance from the high ability child. In pairs where the high
ability child was the novice and the low ability child the expert, the interaction
involved more collaboration and joint construction.
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3.3.2 Control
Rogoff (1990, 1991) conducted various experiments in which children solved
a spatial planning task with adults or with more skilled peers. She measured
the performance of children in a post-test performed without help. Overall she
found better results with adult-child than with child-child pairs but, more
interestingly, she identified an intermediate variable which explains these
variations. Effective adults involved the child in an explicit decision making
process, while skilled peers tended to dominate the decision making. This was
confirmed by the children who collaborated with an adult; those who scored
better in the post-test were those for which the adults made the problem
solving strategy explicit. These results are slightly biased by the fact that the
proposed task (planning) is typically a task in which metaknowledge plays the
central role. A socio-cultural interpretation would be that the explication of the
problem solving strategy provides the opportunity to observe and potentially
internalise the partner's strategy. From a socially shared cognition viewpoint,
one could say that making the strategy explicit is the only way to participate in
each other's strategy and progressively establish a joint strategy.
the difference between social and inner speech. This difference is due to the
fact that "inner speech is just the ultimate point in the continuum of
communicative conditions judged by the degree of 'intimacy' between the
addresser and addressee" (Kozulin, 1990, p. 178). These similarities between
social grounding and internalisation fit with the 'distributed cognition' view
that questions the arbitrary boundary between the social and the individual. As
thinking is described as a language with oneself (Piaget, 1928; Vygotsky,
1978), internalisation may be the process of grounding symbols with oneself.
We can ask whether similar grounding mechanisms also occur in humancomputer collaboration. Some experiments with MEMOLAB (Dillenbourg et
al., 1993) revealed mechanisms of human-computer grounding: the learner
perceives how the system understands him and reacts in order to correct
eventual misdiagnosis. Even in DAI, authors start to emphasise the need for
each agent to model each other (Bird, 1993) and exchange self-descriptions
(Gasser, 1991).
Turning finally to argumentation, we noted above that it is one of the
strategies which may be used in collaborative interactions. As such, the way in
which conflict or disagreement may be resolved in an ensuing argumentation
phase may be strongly influenced by the context of the higher level goal of
achieving agreement. For example, students often take the least line of
resistance" in argumentation, shifting focus to some minor point on which
they have agreed, and thus never "really" resolving the conflict (Baker 1991).
This may be related to the following question posed by Mevarech and Light
(1992, p. 276): "Is conflict itself sufficient as an "active ingredient", or is it the
co-constructed resolution of such conflict which is effective ?". It therefore
seems clear that detailed analysis of argumentations in collaborative dialogues
may help to give finer-grained indications for explaining some experimental
results. At present, little research has been done on this (but see Trognon &
Retornaz, 1990; Resnick et al, 1991), and a vast literature on argumentation in
language sciences remains to be exploited (this is not the place to review such
a literature, but see for example Toulmin, 1958; Barth & Krabbe, 1982; van
Eemeren & Grootendorst, 1984; Voss et al., 1986; Miller, 1987).
6. Synthesis
Collaboration is not simply a treatment which has positive effects on
participants. Collaboration is a social structure in which two or more people
interact with each other and, in some circumstances, some types of interaction
occur that have a positive effect. The conclusion of this chapter could
therefore be that we should stop using the word 'collaboration' in general and
start referring only to precise categories of interactions. The work of Webb,
reported above, showed that even categories such as 'explanation' are too large
to be related to learning outcomes. We have to study and understand the
mechanisms of negotiation to a much greater depth than we have so far.
We do not claim that conversational processes are exclusive candidates for
explaining the effects observed. The 'mere presence' of a partner can, in itself,
be responsible for individual progress. Neither should we discard the role of
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