fiacobelli's Blog

Introduction

Two minds think better than one, the saying goes. But what are the independent minds actually doing when they collaborate? What are they doing to make the collaboration fruitful? Certainly, one alternative is that both individuals work without considering what the other one is doing, but this hardly ends up in a fruitful collaboration. On the other hand, most fruitful collaborations will require active involvement of one the parties and it will require that the parties monitor what the other is doing and interpret his/her actions. Literature from dialogue processes (CITE) tells us a great deal about this. Literature from collaboration and problem solving also points us in important directions.

However, we know very little about these cognitive processes in children, yet the technique of pairing children to solve a problem is a common one in elementary schools. It has been shown that children collaborate and learn in ways that are complementary to the ways in which they learn from adults (Topping 1998; Pellegrini & Galda XXXX). What do they pay attention to? How do they use the information they gather from the environment, their partner and the task?

In this article I will try to review some of the literature out there and sketch a diagram of cognition and behavior to explain, at least in part, some of these processes.

Literature Review

In terms of cognitive activity, Amiztia (Amiztia 1988) suggested that a collaborative context determined the strategies that children adopted when they solve problems together, and that this context is influenced by two features that mediate cognitive growth: observational learning and expert's guidance. Based on her results with experiments on 5 y.o. children building copies of houses with LEGO bricks, she concludes that these are the two major features of collaborative context. Moreover, her results are in disagreement with Piaget's theory of conflict resolution as a means of cognitive growth in young children. Thus, one model one can infer from Amiztia is one with three major components: (a) collaborative context (where observational learning and expert's guidance are inputs); (b) Strategy; and (c) Strategy assessment (which will be based on the amount and quality of discussion between the peers. More productive discussion leads to maintaing the current strategy). Lastly, her research suggests the way in which the collaborative context results in more cognitive learning: (a) The expert talks more and gives longer and more detailed explanations when the partner is a novice; and (b) The novice will look at the expert for guidance and this will result, as predicted by Vygotsky, in more learning for the novice.

    +-----------------+    +---------------+   +-------------------+ 
    | Collaborative   |    | Strategy      |   |Strategy Assessment|
    | context         +--->|               +-->| - Amt. of discuss?|
    | - Observational |    |               |   | - fruitful discus?|
    | - Experts' gide |    |               |   |                   |
    +-----------------+    +---------------+   +-------------------+
    Fig1. A sketch of the framework derived from Amiztia 1988.