The jigsaw as an enhancer of collaborative knowledge integration

TL;DRAbstract

This paper compared two collaborative activities for college students ' integration of research pieces of cognitive science. One is the jigsaw method that assigns different pieces to different students and makes them exchange what they learn. The other is a simpler type of collaboration that gives all pieces to all students in a serial order. Comparing the results, we found that the jigsaw promoted research piece integration more than the other. Detailed analyses of the students' discussion revealed that distributed expertise promoted each one's solid understanding of the assigned piece, which also served as a standpoint for integration. In contrast, the students in the serial-ordered collaboration did not refer to the contents of research pieces as if to take it for granted, which led only to vague abstraction of the pieces. The value of creating diversity by a collaborative script was discussed.

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