{"pk":27365,"title":"Bridging a Conceptual Divide: How Peer Collaboration Facilitates Science Learning","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Collaboration is generally an effective means of learning new\ninformation, but is collaboration productive in domains where\ncollaborators may hold qualitatively different conceptions of\nthe domain’s causal structure? We explored this question in the\ndomain of evolutionary biology, where previous research has\nshown that most individuals construe evolution as the uniform\ntransformation of an entire population (akin to metamorphosis)\nrather than the selective survival and reproduction of a subset\nof the population. College undergraduates (n = 44) completed\nan assessment of their evolutionary reasoning by themselves\n(pretest), with a partner (dyad test), and several weeks later\n(posttest). Collaboration proved ineffective for the higher-\nscoring partner in each dyad, as their scores generally remained\nunchanged from pretest to dyad test to posttest, but it proved\neffective for the lower-scoring partner. Not only did lower-\nscoring partners increase their score from pretest to dyad test,\nbut they maintained higher scores at posttest as well. Follow-\nup analyses revealed that participants’ posttest scores were\npredicted by their partners’ pretest scores but only for lower-\nscoring partners, and the relation was negative: the smaller the\ndifference between pretest score, the greater the gain from\npretest to posttest for lower-scoring partners. These findings\nindicate that collaboration in domains characterized by\nconceptual change is possible, but that learning from such\ncollaboration is asymmetric (i.e., individuals with low levels of\nunderstanding benefit more than their partners do) and unequal\n(i.e., individuals with low levels of understanding benefit more\nif their partner’s understanding is only moderately higher).\nThus, bridging the gap between a novice’s view of a\nconceptually complex domain and an expert’s view appears to\nrequire instruction more aligned with the former than the latter.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"collaboration"},{"word":"conceptual development"},{"word":"science\nlearning"},{"word":"intuitive theories"},{"word":"evolutionary reasoning"}],"section":"Posters: Papers","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2x59657g","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Andrew","middle_name":"","last_name":"Shtulman","name_suffix":"","institution":"Occidental College","department":""},{"first_name":"Andrew","middle_name":"","last_name":"Young","name_suffix":"","institution":"Occidental College","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2017-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/27365/galley/17001/download/"}]}