For several decades, scholars have studied the role of cooperation and its outcomes in educational contexts. Yet we lack a complete understanding of how different instructional strategies impact the relationship between cooperation and learning. In this paper we present results from a field experiment with 82 first-year students in an introductory physics course showing how different instructional strategies led to different social configurations in the classroom and to differences in individual academic performance. Surprisingly, we found that students who actively sought out information from multiple peers were less likely to perform well on well-structured problems as compared to those who did not seek help, whereas, for ill-structured (real-world-like) problems, this effect depended on the features of the learning environment. We observed that good performance on ill and well-structured problems was sensitive to different social network configurations. In a highly clustered network (which contains redundant information), students performed better on well-structured problems than ill-structured problems. By contrast, students with access to network structural holes (which enable access to more diverse information) performed ill-structured problems better than well-structured problems. Finally, ill-structured problems promoted creative thinking, provided that instructors guided the problem-solving process and motivated students to engage in the appropriate cognitive demands these problems entailed. Our results suggest that teaching and instructional strategies play an important role in cooperative learning; therefore, educators implementing cooperative learning methods have to accompany them with adequate instructional strategy.

中文翻译：

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社会网络和物理学中的学术表现：本科生合作加强了结构不良的问题的阐述并阻碍了结构良好的问题的解决

几十年来，学者们研究了合作在教育环境中的作用及其成果。然而，我们对不同的教学策略如何影响合作与学习之间的关系缺乏全面的了解。在本文中，我们介绍了对82名一年级学生进行的物理入门课程的实地实验的结果，这些结果表明不同的教学策略如何导致课堂中的社会形态不同以及个人学习成绩的差异。令人惊讶的是，我们发现，积极主动地从多个同龄人那里寻求信息的学生与没有寻求帮助的学生相比，在结构良好的问题上的表现不太可能，而对于结构不良（类似于现实世界）的问题，这种效果取决于学习环境的特征。我们观察到，在不良和结构合理的问题上的良好表现对不同的社交网络配置敏感。在高度集群的网络（包含冗余信息）中，学生在结构良好的问题上的表现要比结构不良的问题要好。相比之下，具有网络结构漏洞（可以访问更多信息）的学生表现出的结构性问题要比结构性问题好。最后，结构不良的问题会促进创造性思维，前提是教师指导解决问题的过程，并激励学生进行适当的认知要求，以解决这些问题。我们的结果表明，教学策略在合作学习中起着重要的作用。因此，