Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
2006; Rummel & Spada, 2005), because Ge and Land made all their question
prompts available while the criterion report was produced.
Chi and colleagues have studied the role of vicarious learning by collaboratively
observing expert human tutors in the domain of quantitative kinematics in applica-
tions of Newton's three laws of motion. This method has been shown to be effective
in both laboratory (Chi et al., 2008) and classroom settings (Craig, Chi, & VanLehn,
2009). After studying a text and meeting a knowledge criterion involving physics
problems, college students were administered a pretest, followed by an interven-
tion and a posttest. In one intervention condition individual learners were tutored
(interactive
tutoring
) by an experienced expert tutor who was a physics professor
while solving three problems. In a second condition, pairs of learners collaborated
with each other while viewing a videotape (
collaborative observing
) of a session
taken from the tutoring condition while solving the same problems. In a third con-
dition, pairs of learners simply collaborated (
collaboration alone
) while solving the
three problems. In a fourth, individual students observed a videotape (
individual
observing
) taken from the tutoring condition while solving the three problems. In a
fifth (
solo solving
) condition individual learners simply attempted to solve the three
problems, using their textbook as a resource. Learners in both collaborative condi-
tions (collaborative observing, collaboration alone) were encouraged to discuss their
understanding and those in the collaborative observing condition were also encour-
aged to discuss events observed on the tape. Those in the two observing conditions
(collaborative observing and individual observing) also self-paced the video tape,
by stopping it, starting, and rewinding it at any time.
Only some of the results reported by Chi et al. (2008) will be summarized here.
This is because they reported multiple detailed descriptions of their findings, even
dividing learners in the various conditions in terms of pretest scores on some mea-
sures for detailed analyses. Their major findings were that those in the collaborative
observing condition achieved learning gains equivalent to those in the interactive
tutoring condition. This finding is important, because being tutored by an experi-
enced expert (Bloom, 1984) is generally taken as the gold standard (Bloom, 1984;
Cohen, Kulik, & Kulik, 1982; Graesser & Person, 1994) when various learning
environments, including standard classroom instruction, are contrasted. Learners
in the collaboration-alone condition, who were not presented with the recorded
tutoring session, also exhibited significant gains on some measures, when con-
trasted with the individual observing and the solo solving conditions. Collaboration
alone, however, failed to produce the same level of performance as the collaborative
observing or tutoring conditions. This result from the collaboration-alone condi-
tion is somewhat inconsistent with earlier findings (Craig et al., 2004), including
those of Rummel and Spada (2005), who failed to find any difference between their
unscripted collaboration-alone condition and controls who received no intervention
at all prior to the criterion task.
It should be pointed out that being able to control the pace of the videotape might
have played some role in the collaborative observing and individual observing con-
ditions. Chi et al. (2008) did not, however, report the amount of self-pacing in the
two conditions, so what role it might have played is unknown. However, Chi et al.
