Underpinning Collaborative Learning

This chapter investigates the development of, and relations between, children's collaborative abilities and other cognitive skills, most notably mental state understanding and executive functioning. The first half of the chapter presents a review of the development of children's collaborative skills, from early interactions in infancy to peer tutoring in school-age children. The empirical and theoretical evidence of a link between changes in young children's collaborative abilities and their cognitive skills are discussed. The second half of the chapter presents a study that directly investigates the relations between children's peer tutoring and their second-order theory of mind, planning, referential communication and recall skills; showing a direct link between second-order mental state understanding and peer tutoring competence. The chapter concludes by focusing on the multidimensional, bi-directional nature of the relations between collaborative learning and the development of other important cognitive skills.