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was true of writings on cooperative learning in the 1970s and 1980s as well, e.g.,
Johnson and Johnson (1989).
There are some notable exceptions; in particular, we viewed Barron (2000, 2003),
Cohen, Lotan, Abram, Scarloss, & Schultz (2002), Sawyer (2003), Schwartz (1995)
as important preliminary studies of group cognition within the learning sciences.
However, even theories in cognate fields that seem quite relevant to our concerns,
like distributed cognition (Hutchins, 1996), actor-network theory (Latour, 2007),
situated cognition (Lave &Wenger, 1991), ethnomethodology (Garfinkel, 1967) and
activity theory (Engeström, 1987) adopt a different focus, generally on interaction
of individuals with artifacts rather than among people, indicating an orientation to
the larger community scale of social sciences.
Recent commentaries on situated cognition (Robbins & Aydede, 2009) and dis-
tributed cognition (Adams & Aizawa, 2008) frame the issues at the individual level,
even reducing all cognitive phenomena to neural phenomena. At the other extreme,
social theories focus on community phenomena like division of labor, apprentice-
ship training, linguistic structure and laboratory organization. For all its insight
into small-group interaction and its analysis, even ethnomethodology maintains a
sociological perspective, concerned with linguistic communities. Similarly, even
when activity theory addresses the study of teams—in the most detail in Chapter 6
of Engeström (2008)—it is mostly concerned with the group's situation in the larger
industrial and historical context; rather than analyzing how groups interaction-
ally build knowledge, it paraphrases how they deal politically with organizational
management issues. These theories provide valuable insights into group interac-
tion, but none of them thematizes the small-group level as a domain of scientific
study. As sciences, these are sciences of the individual or of the society, not of the
collaborative group.
Each of the three levels of description is populated with a different set of phe-
nomena and processes. For instance, individuals in a chat or threaded discussion
interpret recent postings and design new postings in response; the group constructs,
maintains and repairs a joint problem space and the community evolves its prac-
tices and institutions of social organization. The description of the individual level
is the province of psychology; that of the community is the realm of sociology or
anthropology; the small-group level has no corresponding science .
A science of group interaction would take its irreducible position between the
psychological sciences of the individual and the social sciences of the community—
much as biology analyzes phenomena that are influenced by both chemicals and
organisms without being reducible to either. The science of group interaction would
fill a lacuna in the multi-disciplinary work of the human sciences—including the
learning sciences. This science would not be primarily oriented toward the “low
level” processes of groups, such as mechanical or rote behaviors, but would be
concerned with the accomplishment of creative intellectual tasks. Intellectual team-
work, knowledge work and knowledge-building activities would be prototypical
objects of study. The focus would be on group cognition.
The bifurcation of the human sciences into individual and societal creates an
irreconcilable opposition between individual creative freedom and restrictive social
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