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2. THE MECHANISMS OF COLLABORATIVE LEARNING
2.7 Mutual regulation
During collaborative problem solving, one often has to justify why we did something. These justifications make explicit the strategic knowledge that would otherwise remain implicit. Through these discussions, the two partners regulate mutually their partners activities. Blaye[2] observed that, after collaborative problem solving, partners perform better regulation skills individually. This mechanism can be viewed as a particular case of several of the mechanisms described above:
- - With respect to the conflict mechanism, strategic decisions often raise argument, since heuristics often rely on non clear-cut or ill-formulated criteria ;
- - With respect to the explanation mechanisms, the strategy underlying the solution path constitutes a point for which explanations are often requested;
- - With respect to the internalization and appropriation mechanisms, it has been shown that the regulation of children activities by adults leads children to later use this metaknowledge [17] ;
- - With respect to cognitive load sharing, one difficulty to perform metacognitive processes is that they enter into competition with lower cognitive process for resources (especially working memory). Metacognition involves an increased cognitive load. The fact of allocating cognitive and metacognitive processes (however artificial this boundary may be) to different agents overally benefits for the metacognitive layer (which often comes after other attention mechanisms).
Those mechanisms are nor exclusive, nor independent. They apply to various types of knowledge, but are especially relevant for the type of heuristic knowledge used for regulating problem solving behaviour.
ICCAI 95 article - 08 FEB 95
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