The International Handbook of Collaborative Learning

Abstract

Collaborative learning has become an increasingly important part of education, but the research supporting it is distributed across a wide variety of fields including social, cognitive, developmental, and educational psychology, instructional design, the learning sciences, educational technology, socio-cultural studies, and computer-supported collaborative learning. The goal of this book is to integrate theory and research across these diverse fields of study and, thereby, to forward our understanding of collaborative learning and its instructional applications. The book is structured into the following 4 sections: 1) Theoretical Foundations 2) Research Methodologies 3) Instructional Approaches and Issues and 4) Technology. Key features include the following: • Comprehensive and Global – This is the first book to provide a comprehensive review of the widely scattered research on collaborative learning including the contributions of many international authors. • Cross disciplinary – The field of collaborative learning is highly interdisciplinary drawing scholars from psychology, computer science, mathematics education, science education, and educational technology. Within psychology, the book brings together perspectives from cognitive, social, and developmental psychology as well as from the cross-disciplinary field of the learning sciences. • Chapter Structure – To ensure consistency across the book, authors have organized their chapters around integrative themes and issues. Each chapter author summarizes the accumulated literature related to their chapter topic and identifies the strengths and weaknesses of the supporting evidence. • Strong Methodology – Each chapter within the extensive methodology section describes a specific methodology, its underlying assumptions, and provide examples of its application. This book is appropriate for researchers and graduate level instructors in educational psychology, learning sciences, cognitive psychology, social psychology, computer science, educational technology, teacher education and the academic libraries serving them. It is also appropriate as a graduate level textbook in collaborative learning, computer-supported collaborative learning, cognition and instruction, educational technology, and learning sciences.