The Benefits of Peer Collaboration on Strategy Use, Metacognitive Causal Attribution, and Recall

Abstract

This study examined the benefits of a peer collaborative activity on cognitive strategy use and effectiveness, and on metacognitive understanding of strategy use. Children's knowledge about the effectiveness of the sorting strategy grouped them into lower and higher metacognitive understanding. Treatment group triads, consisting of children with lower and higher levels of metacognitive understanding, were given a collaborative recall task. Results indicated that interaction with children working at a higher level of metacognitive knowledge, in conjunction with directions to explicitly discuss strategies, increased strategy use and induced higher levels of metacognitive thinking in children who had been operating at lower levels of metacognitive thinking. Overall, children's use of the sorting strategy and recall performance improved as a function of treatment group membership. Implications for future research are discussed.