Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This study examined the effects of peer collaboration and investigated discourse activity employed by successful and unsuccessful learners in the domain of biological evolution. Participants included 108 students from grades 9 and 12 assigned to four conditions; individual-assimilation, peerassimilation, individual-conflict, and peer-conflict. Depending on the condition, students were asked to think aloud or discuss with their peers eight scientific statements presented in the order which either maximized or minimized conflict. Several measures of prior knowledge and posttest conceptual change measures were obtained. There were no significant peer effects on conceptual change; a number of interaction effects indicated that peer collaboration was beneficial for older students and when conflict was maximized. Indepth analyses of discourse activity were conducted for four successful and four unsuccessful leamers based on posttest gain scores. Unsuccessful leamers tended to assimilate information from their peers as if it were something ateady known. Conversely, successful leamers were engaged in problem-centred discourse moves treating new information from their peers as something problematic which requires explanation. Contrasts between groups indicated significant differences in problem-centred discourse moves.