Learning Through Collaboration: Designing Collaborative Activities to Promote Individual Learning

Abstract

An experiment was designed and conducted to determine how knowledge diversity and assigned task roles for members in an online virtual collaborative group affects task performance and individual learning, and to explore the role of explanations as a mediating variable in these effects. The effects of knowledge diversity and assigned roles were examined in a collaborative network design-problem solving task, along with two control conditions to compare with individual work with and without self-explanations. Results show that explanations in dyadic discourse improve individual learning, and that groups with knowledge diversity tend to use more explanations than groups with assigned task roles. The results suggest that knowledge diversity and explanations are both important factors in determining how much individual learning occurs and how well it transfers from collaborative activities to similar, novel tasks