Vicarious Learning: more than common ground

The Vicarious Learner project is investigating the roleof dialogue in learning and, more specifically, how learners benefit fromopportunities to ’overhear’ other learners. A direct challenge to thisconcept comes from a study by Schober and Clark which claims that only direct participants can learneffectively from dialogue. We dispute this claim both on grounds thattheir own data indicate otherwise and also from a more theoreticalchallenge to their underlying model. Basically, we argue that Clark’smodel relies too heavily on a notion of common ground as being primarilyabout naming discourse objects. We see educational dialogues in particularas being much more aboutthe complex alignment of concepts where the participants know that aninitial misalignment is fairly certain. We focus instead on thedistinction between reasoning from a particularinterpretation, the focus of Clark’s model, and reasoning to an interpretation and how this might better describe whathappens in learning dialogues and why they might be more beneficial foroverhearers than Clark believes.