O'Donnell, A. M. (Ed.). (2000). Learning with peers: Multiple perspectives on collaboration. The Journal of Experimental Education, 69(1).

From the forward: Peer learning or peer interaction is the subject of study in a wide variety of disciplines. It is used for different purposes and may be considered from the perspectives of developmental psychology, social psychology, sociology, humanistic psychology, and cognitive psychology. In addition, interaction among peers is studied and interpreted from sociocultural perspectives, sociocognitive perspectives, and cognitive-developmental perspectives. The objective of this special issue is to illustrate how the theoretical framework one adopts with respect to understanding peer learning and collaboration has crucial influences on what is studied and how.

This special themed issue includes seven articles. What follows are excerpts from the abstracts of these articles.

Article 1: Peer Collaboration on a Nonverbal Reasoning Task by Urban, Minority Students, by Nancy Vanderhey Samaha and Richard DeLisi

This article describes an experimental study of collaborative reasoning in 86 7th-grade minority students from an urban, low-income school. The students completed items from the Test of Nonverbal Intelligence and were asked to provide written explanations for their judgments. All students worked individually during the pretest and posttest phases of the study. During the experimental phase, some students worked independently while others worked in small, same-gender or mixed-gender groups. Significant improvements in judgments were evident during the experimental phase for all groups except the single-gender female group. Posttest judgment scores declined and were not significantly different from pretest scores for any group. Significant improvements in written explanations for judgments were evident during the experimental phase and were maintained on the posttest by all groups. The students who collaborated had higher percentages of fully correct explanations on the posttest than students who worked alone. Collaborative experiences were beneficial for students' reasoning about unfamiliar, moderately difficult, nonverbal problems.

Spatial Task, by Susan L. Golbeck and Karen Sinagra

This article describes a brief intervention in which 91 college students (69 women, 22 men) explored the effects of peer collaboration on the acquisition of the understanding that water remains invariantly horizontal. Men outperformed women. Although, peer collaboration did not lead to greater understanding than working alone, peer interaction data showed that the men and women talked about the problem differently. Furthermore, the use of gesture during peer discussion predicted spatial understanding.

Article 3: Effects of High and Low Prior Knowledge on Construction of a Joint Problem Space, Cindy E. Hmelo, Anandi Nagarajan, and Roger S. Day

Participants in the study described in this article were 4^th-year medical students designing a clinical trial of a hypothetical new drug. They worked with a computer simulation in two facilitated groups that differed in terms of prior knowledge. Both groups engaged in constructive activity and reached similar endpoints. However, the groups differed qualitatively in how they went about constructing and navigating the joint problem space, and the facilitator played a greater role in the low-prior-knowledge group.

Article 4: The Use of Textbooks as a Tool During Collaborative Physics Learning, by Carla van Boxtel, Jos Van Der Linden, and Gellof Kanselaar

This article describes a study that examined how features of student interaction, and the way an individual student contributes to that interaction, relates to the improvement of conceptual understanding within the domain of physics. The study also investigated how textbooks are used during collaborative work and how that use affects the quality of student interaction and outcomes. The participants were 56 students, ages 15 or 16. A condition in which students were provided with two textbooks was compared with a condition without the availability of textbooks. The use of textbooks had a negative influence on the amount of elaboration and co-construction. Individual learning outcomes were positively related to the amount of collaborative elaboration.

Article 5: The Structure of Discourse in Collaborative Learning, by Clark A. Chinn, Angela M. O’Donnell, and Theresa S. Jinks

This article describes a study that examined the types of discourse structures that emerge during peer learning and the ways in which those structures are related to learning. One hundred and five 5^th graders learned about writing conclusions that summarized the results of experiments they had conducted with electrical circuits. In groups of four, they discussed the quality of three conclusions. The discourse structure of the discussions could be readily characterized as a network of arguments and counterarguments. Quantitative measures of the quality of those argument structures were positively related to improvement in the students’ ability to write their own conclusions. Students who simply discussed whether the three conclusions were OK or not OK generated less complex arguments structures than the students who discussed which of the three conclusions was best and which was worst. Results suggest the importance of considering the structure of peer discourse as a mediator of what students learn from peer interactions.

Article 6: Theory, Method, and Analysis in Research on the Relations Between Peer Collaboration and Cognitive Development, by Jonathan Tudge

From a perspective informed by the writings of T. Kuhn, S.C. Pepper, and L.T. Winegar, the author of this article assesses the extent to which each of the other articles in this special issue related theory to methods and to analysis.

Article 7: The Role of Theory in the Study of Peer Collaboration, by Peggy Van Meter and Robert J. Stevens

The authors of this commentary discuss the role of theory in each of the other articles in this special issue. The authors identify how theory affected the work of each group of researchers and make the case that the real need lies in the integration of those theories and in the integration of all findings relevant to applied questions of collaborative processes. Following a brief review of relevant theories, the authors demonstrate how a cohesive, integrated theory of group processes can be adopted.