Promoting Understanding and Knowledge Acquisition through Effective Collaboration

The specific goals of the projects are to: 1) document a relationship between the quality of interaction in a group and the quality of outcomes from group interaction, and 2) to determine if the quality of interaction can be influenced by intervening in the preparatory activities of a group by planning, or by intervening in the activities of group members engaged in discussion. The target content for this project is the human circulatory system. This material provides an opportunity to explore students' learning of a complex system. The project involves an examination of middle school students working in collaborative groups to come to an understanding of the circulatory system. Collaborative groups will first learn about the circulatory system of the proboscis worm. They will subsequently work together to determine how the human circulatory system is different from that of this worm. The project will examine the effects of two strategies for providing cognitive support to the collaborative group with the goal of promoting high levels of discourse. One strategy involves students planning how to go about making a complex comparison by listing ideas and organizing and grouping those ideas. A second strategy involves having students generating sets of comprehension and elaboration questions that they then use in making the comparison. Outcomes assessed will include the quality of discourse and the quality of explanations and reasoning provided by groups. The research can contribute to an understanding of how children piece together a theory about how systems work. The data to be collected here will provide insight into how students reason by analogy and by comparison. The results will also contribute to theories about how to scaffold learning in the classroom. Students may be unable to implement the more complicated 'planning' strategy, suggesting that particular approaches to prompting metacognition may be too difficult. It is also conceivable that the planner may focus more quickly on key issues in the comparisons they make. The data collected here will provide a window on some aspects of the transferability of metacognitive prompting. From a practical standpoint, clear data on how to support students' reasoning and explanations will be available. This information will be helpful to teachers as they attempt to have students engage in higher levels of reasoning and thinking.