Socio-cognitive processes

Socio-cognitive processes are bound to social cognition, which can be defined as cog-nitive processes that involve other people (Frith & Blakemore, 2006). More precisely, it relates to the perception, understanding and implementation of cognitive pro-cesses that involve interpersonal information (Suchy & Holdnack, 2013). In this per-spective, socio-cognitive processes represent interpersonal behaviors complement-ing individual ones and interplaycomplement-ing with them (Dillenbourg, 1999). Indeed, socio-cognitive processes such as constructive conflict (see below) or mutual explanation (Dillenbourg et al., 1996) occur in addition to self-explanation or reasoning. For De-cuyper et al. (2010), there is a need to focus on these socio-cognitive processes as they help to understand how the outputs of collaboration arise and why they are sometimes detrimental to group outcomes.

Socio-cognitive processes include three main activities, namely, knowledge acqui-sition, participation, and creation, that shape group collaboration. Knowledge ac-quisitioninvolves developing a shared mental model of knowledge; it covers the sharing, storage, and retrieval processes. Participation refers to the creation of shared discourse; it includes team reflexivity, team activity, and boundary-crossing.

Finally, creation relates to the creation of new knowledge. It encompasses co-construction and constructive conflict. Sharing, co-co-construction and constructive conflict are thought to be the core processes enabling high-quality interactions (De-cuyper et al., 2010).

Knowledge acquisition Sharingrelates to communication about non-previously shared knowledge, competencies, opinions, and creative thoughts from one person to another. Storage andretrieval concern group knowledge, learned procedures, and shared ideas produced in the group that must be stored to promote the per-sistence of the team over time. Storage can take the form of memory (individ-ual or shared) or material artifacts (e.g., paper, computer). The way learners store and retrieve group information is of great importance. Notably, indexing, filtering and maintaining cues about group information improve the quality of both stor-age and retrieval (Wilson, Goodman and Cronin, as cited in Decuyper et al., 2010).

(Cannon-Bowers & Salas, 2001) have classified stored information as task-specific, task-related, about teammates and attitudes/beliefs. Task-specific knowledge is tacit knowledge that does not imply group communication (e.g., procedures) and can be applied only to the current task. Task-related knowledgeaims to promote the team’s ability to carry out the task and holds between tasks (e.g., knowledge about teamwork functioning). Teammates’ knowledge represents the knowledge

that learners have about each other (e.g., preferences, strengths, weaknesses, and tendencies). Finally, shared attitudes and beliefs may relate to task difficulty or group motivational tone. Knowledge acquisition processes promote the creation of shared representations of group knowledge and understanding(Decuyper et al., 2010). Different designations describe the same or a closely related concept, espe-cially grounding (Baker et al., 1999), cognitive convergence (Jorczak, 2011; Teasley et al., 2008), or mutual knowledge or understanding. These shared representations in-volve the creation of mental models. They combine information coming from both oneself and the other group members. Self-modelling is an integrated representa-tion of personal task-processing. Besides, partner-modeling builds on inferences regarding one’s partner’s mental states (Dillenbourg et al., 2016). Mental models are built and updated through stored information throughout the collaborative task.

This process usually implies to facilitate mutual exchanges, promote intercompre-hension) and promote role change (Decuyper et al., 2010). The capacity that groups members have to align their mental models of each other’s appear is an important aspect of successful collaboration (Sangin et al., 2007).

Participation Team reflexivity is socio-meta-cognitive process that will be ad-dressed in section 2.3.2.Team activityrefers to the mobilization of the physical and psychological means necessary for task achievement. It involves a progressive mu-tual adaptation to each other’s behaviors leading towards more coordination and ef-ficiency. This process is partially unconscious as it often relies on implicit knowledge and communication that people do not realize. Following Arrow and Cook (2008), Decuyper et al. (2010) distinguish between coordinated activity and chaotic activity and support the idea that both of them contribute to team efficiency in groups. In-deed, coordinated activity benefit to the group as it promotes the development of routines that help teammates to operate smoothly. However, it may in return hin-der creativity. On the other hand, although a lack of coordination may disrupt team functioning by increasing errors, for example, it may also lead to the emergence of constructive conflict that promotes creative thought. Besides team activity, groups generally learn within boundaries (e.g., domain-knowledge or expertise). Moving beyond these boundaries, i.e., create boundary-crossing, may enhance group learn-ing and therefore represents another facilitatlearn-ing process in group learnlearn-ing. More specifically,boundary-crossingrefers to the process of "transporting ideas, concepts, and instruments from seemingly unrelated domains into the domain of focal in-quiry" (Engeström et al., 1995, p. 321). As reported in Akkerman and Bakker (2011), boundary-crossing pushes teammates to achieve hybrid learning, combining ingre-dients from different contexts. These authors discern four mechanisms of boundary-crossing, namely identification, coordination, reflection, and transformation. Iden-tificationmeans defining one practice in light with another. It involves identifying

identities based on each other’s practices. Coordination includes processes dedi-cated to facilitating boundary-crossing. It implies communicative connection (pro-motion of mutual exchanges), translating effort (pro(pro-motion of intercomprehension), enhancement of boundary permeability (e.g., promotion of role change) and rou-tinization (promotion of automatized procedures). The third mechanism is reflec-tion. It highlights the importance of a reflexive effort, especially perspective-taking, i.e., to see one’s own practice through the other’s point of view. Finally, boundary-crossing also impliestransformation, which refers, for example, to the creation of new in-between practices. Boundary crossing research has shown to promote the provision and dissemination of information in the group as well as group efficiency across time (Brooks and Edmondson, as cited in Decuyper et al., 2010).

Creation Co-construction implies elaborating knowledge, competencies, opin-ions, and creative thoughts through others. It refers to repeated cycles where learners acknowledge, repeat, paraphrase, enunciate, question, concretize, and complete shared knowledge, competencies, opinions or creative thoughts. Con-structive conflict involves that learners have diverse opinions that require negotiation, and the overcoming of disagreement enhance group learning, learning going beyond their comfort zone. Contrary to a regular conflict, where learners face personal and emotional rejection, leading at best to leaving off the source of conflict, constructive conflict is rather seen as a difference in the interpretation of the problem. This divergence leads to integrate viewpoints differences in promoting the exploration of the same problem from different perspectives. Co-construction and constructive conflict can be integrated into the concept of transactivity (Teasley, 1997; Weinberger & Fischer, 2006). Transactivity (Berkowitz & Gibbs, 1983) refers to "the degree to which a person uses his or her conversational turn to operate on the reasoning of the partner or to clarify ideas" (Teasley, 1997, p. 362). It has emerged from research in various domains that highlights that students who engage in highly transactive discussions learn more from the collaboration than those who do not (Teasley, 1997). Hence, it reflects the quality of the conversational actions taking place in a group (Zoethout et al., 2017). Berkowitz and Gibbs (1983) highlight different types of transactive behaviors or transacts divided into two main types, namely representational and operational. Representational transacts refer to a lower level of transactivity because they elicit or represent other’s reasoning.

Instead, operational transacts operate on or transform other’s reasoning. Exam-ples of representational transact are feedback request, paraphrase or competitive juxtaposition, i.e., the learner can concede a point while reaffirming his or her position. On the other hand, examples of operational transacts can be clarification, extension, or critical reasoning, i.e., the learner points out that other’s thinking is questionable in some way. Lately, Weinberger and Fischer (2006) have reviewed the concept of transactivity and described five processes ranging from no transactive to highly transactive, namely externalization, elicitation, quick consensus building,

integration-oriented consensus building, and conflict-oriented consensus building.

Externalizationimplies that learners provide contributions that are not related to previous contributions. These contributions usually take place at the beginning of the discussion. Elicitation involves asking questions to receive help and can be used to improve co-construction. Quick consensus refers to a rapid agreement of the other’s contribution. In this case, it does not change the learner’s perspective but instead helps to prolong the discussions of ideas (Barron, 2003). In this sense, it can be seen as an essential process contributing to a successful collaboration (Damsa et al., 2013). However, it may also become detrimental if learners remain in that mode and fail to move towards higher levels of transactivity. In contrast to quick consensus building, integration-oriented consensus-building relates to an integrative form of reasoning. In this case, learners operate actively on the other’s reasoning. They are responsive to persuasive argument and change or give up their initial view when it is appropriate. Finally,conflict-oriented consensus buildingis assumed to be the higher level of transactivity and is consistent with the concept of constructive conflict described above. In this kind of interaction, learners receive critiques that challenge their perspective and push themselves to refine the pros or cons of their views. In this way, they operate deeper on their reasoning and that of their partner. Greater transactivity has been shown to stimulate productive collaborative learning (Noroozi et al., 2013b; Teasley, 1997). However, learning gains are assumed to be higher when learners succeed to strike a balance between consensus, conflict, and sharing. On the other hand, too much consensus, conflict, or sharing appear to be detrimental to collaborative learning.

In summary, collaborative problem-solving involve socio-cognitive processes, i.e., cognitive processes involving others (Suchy & Holdnack, 2013). They complement and interplay with individual cognitive processes (Dillenbourg, 1999). Socio-cognitive processes include three main activities, knowledge acquisition, participation and creation (Decuyper et al., 2010). Knowledge acquisition includes sharing, storing and retrieving information contribut-ing to creatcontribut-ing shared mentals models. Participation refers to the creation of a shared discourse through mutual adaptation and coordination. Finally, creation refers to the co-creation of new knowledge among group members through co-construction and constructive conflict.