Effects of prior knowledge on collaborative and individual learning
By Jimmy Zambrano Ramírez, Femke C. Kirschner, John Sweller, Paul A. Kirschner. Learning and Instruction, 2019
114 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Abstract Collaborative learning is an extensively used instructional technique by which individuals interact in small groups to learn to solve academic problems. This study aimed to determine the impact of task-specific prior knowledge on individual learners and collaborative groups that were instructed to collaborate. A 2 (individual vs. collaborative group) × 2 (novice vs. knowledgeable learners) factorial experiment with 228 students was carried out to examine the effects of these treatments on performance and mental effort in learning and its outcomes. As expected, knowledgeable individuals and knowledgeable collaborative groups outperformed novice individuals and novice collaborative groups in learning outcomes. Less knowledgeable, collaborating learners outperformed less knowledgeable, individual learners in learning outcomes. While more knowledgeable collaborating and individual learners performed equally well in the learning phase and the delayed test, on the retention test, collaborative groups demonstrated better performance. In general, collaboration benefited learning compared to individual learning in complex tasks, but performance depended on the learner task-specific prior knowledge.
Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Education
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5c0a7717dfaa419a564d1714aa644333e7d57fb1
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Developmental and Educational Psychology
In Education
Citations in the corpus
- Eye-Tracking in Educational Practice: Investigating Visual Perception Underlying Teaching and Learning in the Classroom (2020, background): “Previous research, however, indicates that such a learning scenario does not necessarily translate into learning in a classroom, both in terms of learning outcomes (Skuballa et al. 2019; Zambrano et al. 2019) and visual perception (Oliva et al. 2017).”