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based on either a psychological view of individuals or a sociological view of rules,
etc. at the community level. None of them have a foundational conception of small
groups as a distinct level. They confuse talk at the group level and at the social
level, and they lack a developed account of the relationships between individual,
group and community.
If we take group phenomena seriously as “first-class objects” of our the-
ory, then we can study: interpersonal trains of thought, shared understandings of
diagrams, joint problem conceptualizations, common references, coordination of
problem-solving efforts, planning, deducing, designing, describing, problem solv-
ing, explaining, defining, generalizing, representing, remembering and reflecting
as a group. In our studies, we will see that the group-cognitive accomplishments
emerge from the network of meaningful references built up by, for instance,
textual postings in online chat. We will see how the group and its cognitive
accomplishments are enacted in situated interaction.
A Model of the New Science
Having motivated the development of a science of group cognition as future work,
let us see how the VMT Project (Stahl, 2009) may have begun to prepare the way.
Preparing for a new science requires three major undertakings:
(a) The domain of the science must not only be defined, it must be explored and
captured in the form of a data corpus.
(b) Methods for analyzing the data must be selected, adapted, refined and mastered.
(c) Analytic findings must be organized in terms of a framework of theoretical
conceptualizations.
The VMT Project at Drexel University has approached these tasks by
(a) creating a synchronous online service in which small groups of students
engaged in problem-solving work in mathematics;
(b) conducting chat interaction analysis of a number of case studies from the data
recorded in that service and
(c) conceptualizing some of the features of the small-group interactions that were
observed.
The first step in the VMT design-based research process was to start simply and
see what issues came up. We had seen in face-to-face case studies that there were
problems with (i) recording and transcribing the verbal interaction, (ii) capturing
the visual interaction and (iii) knowing about all the influences on the interaction.
We decided to form groups of students who did not know each other and who
only interacted through text chat. Students were recruited through the Math Forum
at Drexel University, an established online resource center. We used AIM, AOL's
