Evaluating collaborative learning methods: When is it better to tell students the answer and when is it better to let them try to figure it out?

When School of Education graduate student David Sears was a junior at Reed College he began to pursue a curiosity that arose five years earlier when he switched from an ability-grouped high school to a more heterogeneous school. The climate and the interaction were better in the class with a mix of students, he recalls today from his office in Wallenberg Hall. Now a Stanford School of Education Ph.D. candidate, Sears’ dissertation focuses on the techniques and environments that most improve learning, questions he first began pondering as an undergraduate.

“We all want to make learning more effective,” he says. “How do you make it so students don’t just regurgitate information but actually take it and apply it in life?” The concept is known as transfer, and researchers believe finding optimal ways to facilitate transfer is key to improving education.

Sears designed his dissertation research to seek answers to two important questions:

1. When do you just tell students the answer, and when do you let them try to figure it out?
2. What types of learning tasks afford productive group interactions and what do those interactions look like?

The design builds upon work with School of Education Professor Dan Schwartz and University of Washington Professor John Bransford. In a first study, Sears established two groups of Stanford students that learned about cholesterol and the circulatory system. In one class Sears gave pairs of students answers to practice and study. In the other, partners had to figure out the answers for themselves. Those that had to find the answers showed more knowledge sharing. Now Sears is comparing groups and individuals on a math task.

“We are attempting to reconcile the question in the transfer literature about when is it better to tell them versus when is it better to let them invent, while also examining the effects of these different activities on students’ collaboration” says Sears, who is videotaping the sessions for later analysis.

As collaborative activities become more prevalent in schools and industry, the hope is that this work can inform what types of tasks are better done together and which are better done alone.

Sears plans to continue his research as a faculty member at Purdue University in Indiana in August.

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