Collaborative Learning Projects

Collaborative learning arrangements can be a powerful way to engage students in productive intellectual dialogue, provide opportunities for joint discovery and design, and support the development of unique kinds of metacommunicative strategies. Despite its potential, we still understand little about what constitutes effective collaboration or the conditions required to foster it. My research on collaboration investigates reasons for variability in collective accomplishments. I’ve been particularly interested in cases where significant differences emerge between groups in what they accomplish, despite the equivalence of prior knowledge of group members, the insights that individuals generate in the group, and the amount of task-related talk they engage in. My findings highlight the dual nature of collaboration as a context in which content related issues and relational phenomena are deeply intertwined and fundamentally related to collective achievement and individual learning outcomes.

Collaborative problem solving
In one series of studies I have used video records of collaborative activity to identify discourse and other interactional features that distinguish more and less successful collaborative efforts. This research relies on both quantitative and qualitative analyses of conversations using group performance as an analytic contrast to identify differences in the nature of the dialogue that emerges in more and less successful groups.

Collaborative design
In other research I am using survey and interview methodology to examine students’ reflections on collaborative design work carried out over longer periods of time. This work is in the context of high school computer science or design projects (see Bermuda Computing project) as well as with college level computer science courses (in collaboration with Emma Mercier). We are working to articulate metacognitive, motivational, and relational outcomes of collaborative efforts as well as identify valued dimensions of collaborative activity from the perspective of the participants.