Rethinking Collaborative Learning

In recent years new translations and interpretations of the work of Vygotsky have generated considerable research activity by developmental paychologists and educational researchers on the relationship between the social and cognitive dimensions of learning. Collaborative Learning aims to bring together, for the fiirst time in a single volume, up-to-date and comprehensive research on collaborative learning and learning to collaborate from leading international workers in the field. The contributions converge around the questions of when and how peer interaction can facilitate understanding and learning, how we conceptualise the nature and quality of collaborative activity, how productive collaborative activity can be supported, and how children learn to collaborate. The authors critically examine the ways in which psychologists and educational researchers conceptualise the nature and quality of collaborative activity and examine the different contexts in which such activity is studied.