Thinking aloud together: A test of an intervention to foster students' collaborative scientific reasoning

This study addressed the question of how to increase students' competencies for regulating their co-construction of knowledge when tackling complex co llaborative learning tasks which are increasingly emphasized as a dimension of educational reform. An intervention stressing the metacognitive, regula tory, and strategic aspects of knowledge co-construction, called Thinking A loud Together, was embedded within a 12-week science unit on building menta l models of the nature of matter. Four classes of eighth graders received t he intervention, and four served as control groups for quantitative analyse s, in addition, the interactions of 24 students in eight focal groups were profiled qualitatively, and 12 of those students were interviewed twice. St udents who received the intervention gained in metacognitive knowledge abou t collaborative reasoning and ability to articulate their collaborative rea soning processes in comparison to students in control classrooms, as hypoth esized. However, the treatment and control students did not differ either i n their abilities to apply their conceptual knowledge or in their on-line c ollaborative reasoning behaviors in ways that were attributable to the inte rvention. Thus, there was a gap between students' metacognitive knowledge a bout collaborative cognition and their use of collaborative reasoning skill s. Several reasons for this result are explored, as are patterns relating s tudents' outcomes to their perspectives on learning science. (C) 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.