Abstract

Collaboration provides learners with opportunities to develop an understanding beyond what they could achieve alone. To this end, learners need to build on each other’s knowledge to draw new conclusions. This requires successful retrieval, inferencing, and mutual referencing during collaboration. Although individual preparation is considered as effective means to foster these processes it has not been systematically investigated whether, why, and under what conditions it does so. We revisit research on collaborative learning, collaborative memory, and group brainstorming to develop hypotheses about the cognitive advantages and disadvantages of individual preparation for collaboration and how these might be influenced by the design of the individual preparation phase. Subsequently, we test these hypotheses by systematically reviewing experimental studies. Results indicate that (a) individual preparation affects retrieval, inferencing, and referencing differently, and (b) generative preparation tasks and supporting learners’ cognitive group awareness can enhance the advantages and mitigate the disadvantages of individual preparation for collaboration.

摘要

协作为学习者提供了机会，使他们获得了超出他们单单可以取得的成就的理解。为此，学习者需要在彼此的知识基础上得出新的结论。这需要在协作过程中成功进行检索，推断和相互引用。尽管个人准备被认为是促进这些过程的有效手段，但尚未系统地调查是否，为什么以及在何种条件下这样做。我们将重新研究有关协作学习，协作记忆和集体讨论的研究，以得出有关个人准备合作的认知优势和劣势以及个人准备阶段的设计如何影响这些假设的假设。后来，我们通过系统地回顾实验研究来检验这些假设。结果表明：（a）个体准备会影响检索，推断和引用的方式不同；（b）生成性准备任务和支持学习者的认知小组意识可以增强个体准备进行协作的优势，并减轻其不利之处。