Collaborative Learning

by
Back to Primers

Authors: Jeremy Roschelle, Dan Suthers, Shuchi Grover
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Overview

Learning to explain, justify, critique, etc. are essential skills for today’s citizens, for scientists, and in many other careers. These activities are intrinsically social. Further, conceptually challenging content is often best learned by working together with other learners. However, merely asking students to “work together” is not enough to lead to positive learning outcomes. Tools and activities must be designed to enable, structure, and guide social interactions to facilitate effective learning.

Collaborative learning engages students to work as a team in learning together, and is not just a matter of dividing up work among members of a team. When collaborative learning is working well, students engage in building on each others’ contribution, and individuals learn from their team as the team advances a shared outcome. Effective collaborative learning teams are able to manage both their team relationships and progress on tasks, and are able to monitor and reflect on their process. Terms used to indicate the essence of learning together include: joint problem solving, intersubjectivity, shared/collective/group/distributed cognition, collective consciousness, and transactive discourse.

Theories of collaborative learning give shape to design and analysis of collaborative learning. From a constructivist perspective, learning occurs as students make sense of their experience. A social experience can be rich in new ideas, conflict with one’s own ideas, and high expectations for the quality of ideas. From a social cognition perspective, learners’ efforts to find common ground and share information with others can creates optimal conditions for developing knowledge, with appropriate levels of challenge and support. A participatory perspective focuses on the process of becoming an effective member of a community, and includes learning the social norms, practices, language, activities and tools of the community — while also developing one’s individual skill in doing the work of the community. Each of these theories has had a profound influence on how designers and researchers address collaborative learning.

The core agenda of collaborative learning in cyberlearning is the design and investigation of social technologies to influence the interactions of students in groups, and thereby to increase learning in the group. Targets for design and investigation can include motivational, social, and cognitive dimensions of interacting in groups. Tools often aim to better support specific features of social interaction (argumentation, negotiation, communication, explanation), enable groups to represent social knowledge (improving social awareness and helping students in capturing, referring to, visualizing, organizing, analyzing, critiquing, etc. each other’s ideas.), or guide teams through activities (scripting, scaffolding or coaching). Tools often make features of collaborative learning more visible to members of the group and more available for action by the group. Designs for collaborative learning recognize that students sometimes work as individuals, in small groups and in large ensembles (such as a classroom or a online discussion group) and that effective environments support students across these modalities. Some designs seek to help teachers orchestrate many simultaneous or sequenced social learning activities.

Important elements of collaborative learning include:

  • motivation for the effort of working with another learner
  • joint attention, students are looking at the same things
  • mutual engagement, students are actively involved with each other
  • individual agency, each student has responsibility and opportunity for action in the team and for learning from the team’s work
  • group action and accountability, students are discussing, making or problem solving together and the result of their group’s work matters
  • design of roles, responsibilities and measures of progress
  • constructive discourse patterns, including making and acknowledging contributions, finding common ground, providing and receiving help, etc.
  • monitoring and reflecting on teamwork (i.e., meta-cognition and self-regulation)
  • orchestrating participation across activities, places, roles, etc.

Research that investigates collaborative learning almost always include methods for analyzing students’ interactions, conversations, and participation in teams or groups — analyzing the process of collaborative learning is important. Research can look at learning as students interact face-to-face or at a distance. Data is often captured by audio or video recording, but also by capturing what students do with technology. Emerging technologies such as eye-tracking can also help capture joint attention. Outcome measures can include individual growth or can focus on the increased capacity of the group — and outcomes can be cognitive (knowledge and skill), interpersonal (membership in a group), or social (skills in learning together). Research can be framed as (a) iterative, design-based research or (b) as comparative experiments or (c) in terms of socio-cultural analysis.

Researchers in collaborative learning often share their work through the activities of the International Society of the Learning Sciences, including a conference series and journal.

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