Review by: Son, Do-Lenh (2008-07-02)

There have been different perspectives both in theory and practice on the field of collaborative learning. The article is an effort to provide an overview of the development of research on collaboration through both theoretical and empirical studies in psychology and distributed artificial intelligence. The survey especially emphasizes the evolution of research along the line, from considering the individual as the unit of analysis to focusing on social activity and the group in which the individuals collaborate. The authors do not mean to imply that one viewpoint was better than the other. They assume that the increased attention the social perspective is drawing recently is due to the previous neglect.

For theories, one can imagine an axis representing the unit of analysis. At one end lies the individual. The goal of this point of view is to analyze how individual cognition develops with messages received from another. The other end of the axis highlights the group as the unit of analysis. Somewhere along the line, we can find three other theoretical views: socio-constructivist, socio-cultural and shared (distributed) cognition.

While the socio-constructivist theoretical approach, motivated by Piaget’s viewpoint, appraises interaction with others in the group, its empirical elaboration remains based on individual performance evaluations. The socio-cultural theme is inspired by Vygotsky’s theory, arguing cognitive development occurs on an inter-psychological (social) and then on the intra-psychological (individual) planes. The shared cognition approach, associated with situated cognition theory (Suchman,1987 and Lave, 1988), suggesting that learning is situated, i. e. always takes place in a specific context, and hence challenges the fundamentals of previous theories that discriminate social and cognitive processes, as well as questioning the evaluation that are conducted individually in previous experiments.

In accordance with theory development, the experimental paradigm evolves from “effect” to “conditions” and “interactions”. Research on the effects has failed to clarify if collaborative learning is more efficient than learning alone as both positive and negative effects are found from experiments. Thus, the research focus has turned to studying under which conditions collaborative learning is effective. Various independent variables are examined, e. g. group composition, individual prerequisites, task features, etc. though, there is no simple answer to such a question as independent variables interact with one another in a complex way. The third paradigm tries to look closer into the process to understand which interactions are occurring and which effects they have on collaboration.

Apart from the emphasis on the evolution of collaborative learning research, the authors also present the obvious advantage of computer usage as a medium for collaborative processes. It can help on two aspects: allowing researchers to tune parameters in experiments, and fostering social interaction, e. g. explanation, negotiations etc. Some tools for analyzing and supporting collaboration are also presented.

As a result of the literature review the authors conclude that research in collaborative learning should focus more on the sub-categories of interaction, rather than on “collaboration” in general which is too broad a concept.