The Productive Agency that Drives Collaborative Learning

In over 60 years of research, there have been very few demonstrations that working in a small collaborative group yields cognitive outcomes that cannot be matched or exceeded by the most competent member of the group rule induction (Laughlin & Futoran, 1985). The research suggests that there is nothing particularly special about working in small groups, at least with regards to cognitive outcomes like learning and intellectual artifacts. Yet, this assertion seems to fly in the face of common sense. For example, I recently had a discussion with an ethologist, Dick Porter, who studies whether prenatal exposures to odors affect behaviors after birth. He described studies in which chicken eggs are exposed to a groups of three chicks are placed in cages with a dish of scented grain and a dish of plain grain. He then observes their behavior towards the two dishes. What is of relevance here is why he uses three chicks per cage instead of one. Although chickens are cheap, they are not that cheap; and using three chickens as the unit of analysis increased the number of chickens he needs threefold. He explained that the reason for using three chicks is that if you put a single chick in a cage it stands still. It loses all productive agency. It will not move towards either dish of grain in the attempt to learn the location of the preferred food. Chickens, like humans, are very social creatures. In the case of the chickens, it is quite clear that two heads (or three heads) are better than one-better in ways that have profound effects on their abilities to learn. Yet, in the case of humans, there is little research that shows that 2+ heads are much better than one. What are we to conclude? That chickens are different than humans or that our small group research has been missing something? Well, clearly the former is true, but so is the latter. This latter point is where the papers in this volume come into play. As a collective, the chapters take on the very important and difficult task of trying to develop new research approaches that can help identify what is special about collaboration. The authors of the chapters draw on state of the art research techniques involving robots and humans, and they tackle state of the art problems such as creating computer supported collaborations. Bringing computers into the …