Playing single-player tasks together: Dyads’ collaborative activities across two games in Math Garden

Abstract

Much research on collaborative learning focuses on working together on tasks that are designed with collaboration in mind. However, teachers may ask children to collaborate on single player tasks as well, given a scarcity of available computers in the classroom or assuming that children can learn from each other and motivate each other. In the current study, we studied the conversations of primary school children (N = 64; 39 girls, 25 boys) working together in dyads in an adaptive single-player math learning environment (Math Garden). We aimed to investigate (1) how dyads collaborate across two math tasks aimed at practicing different math skills (arithmetic vs. reasoning skills) embedded within Math Garden and (2) whether collaborative activities differed across the two math tasks. We studied both individual utterances as well as episodes of social metacognitive interactions between the dyad members. We found that children engaged in activities important for successful collaboration, such as relational and metacognitive activities. Moreover, we identified social metacognitive episodes, meaning that children regulated their groups’ learning and that the regulatory processes which took part within the collaborative learning session cannot be reduced to individual activities. We conclude that children engage in collaborative activities when working together on single player tasks. And, in line with previous research, these collaborative activities differed across games, highlighting that collaborative learning is shaped by the task at hand.