Situational mechanisms of peer group interaction in collaborative meaning-making: Processes and conditions for learning

Abstract

This paper discusses a case study that investigated situational mechanisms of peer group interaction in collaborative activity. Its goal was to highlight the processes and conditions for meaning-making and to characterise the complex relations of social and cognitive processes emerging in peer-mediated collaborative learning. The pedagogical framework derives from situated views of cognition which aim to engage the learner in activities which encourage problem posing and solving, negotiation and knowledge construction. Twenty 12 year-olds participated in the study. Each student worked in solo and in dyadic conditions on two tasks from their mathematics and language curriculum. Data were gathered by means of videotapes, direct observations, transcriptions, stimulated recall interviews, questionnaires and evaluations of the students’ task productions. Social interaction was analysed at a micro-analytic level within a three-dintensional analytic framework focusing on the communicative function, the nature of collaboration and cognitive processes. The results highlight the interactional and discursive processes inherent in peer-mediated collaborative learning and reveal situational features of students’ social activity which either support or inhibit successful collaboration. The ways in which the logic of peer interaction is reciprocally established in students’ evolving interactions and is shaped by their social and cognitive activity is highlighted. The results inaicate that the complexity and openness of the task, student initiation in meaning-making, and the opportunity to use different semiotic tools are important for supporting dialogic meaning-making in solo and in collaborative activity.