Bridging a Conceptual Divide: How Peer Collaboration Facilitates Science Learning

Collaboration is generally an effective means of learning new information, but is collaboration productive in domains where collaborators may hold qualitatively different conceptions of the domain’s causal structure? We explored this question in the domain of evolutionary biology, where previous research has shown that most individuals construe evolution as the uniform transformation of an entire population (akin to metamorphosis) rather than the selective survival and reproduction of a subset of the population. College undergraduates (n = 44) completed an assessment of their evolutionary reasoning by themselves (pretest), with a partner (dyad test), and several weeks later (posttest). Collaboration proved ineffective for the higherscoring partner in each dyad, as their scores generally remained unchanged from pretest to dyad test to posttest, but it proved effective for the lower-scoring partner. Not only did lowerscoring partners increase their score from pretest to dyad test, but they maintained higher scores at posttest as well. Followup analyses revealed that participants’ posttest scores were predicted by their partners’ pretest scores but only for lowerscoring partners, and the relation was negative: the smaller the difference between pretest score, the greater the gain from pretest to posttest for lower-scoring partners. These findings indicate that collaboration in domains characterized by conceptual change is possible, but that learning from such collaboration is asymmetric (i.e., individuals with low levels of understanding benefit more than their partners do) and unequal (i.e., individuals with low levels of understanding benefit more if their partner’s understanding is only moderately higher). Thus, bridging the gap between a novice’s view of a conceptually complex domain and an expert’s view appears to require instruction more aligned with the former than the latter.