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Knowledge diversity is widely acknowledged to be beneficial for collaborative groups engaged in problem solving. An experiment was conducted to determine whether knowledge diversity and assigned task roles for members in an online virtual collaborative group affect group task performance and individual learning and transfer, and to explore the role of explanations as a mediating variable in these effects. Two control conditions were included that involved individual work, with and without self-explanations. Results showed that the frequency of explanations in dyadic discourse were correlated with individual learning, and that groups with knowledge diversity tend to use more explanations. These findings suggest that discussing explanations is a key feature of successful group work that contributes to determining how much individual learning occurs and how well it transfers from collaborative activities to similar, novel tasks.

Research on human collaboration has suggested thatknowledge diversity improves group performance in complextasks such as design, problem solving and forecasting.However, in educational settings it is important to also askwhether learning and transfer for individuals within the groupis enhanced or hindered by diversity in collaborative workgroups. We compare performance in a transportation networkdesign task for two types of collaborative groups, andcompare their performance to that of individuals. In onegroup condition (Distributed Knowledge) each dyad memberhas been trained on a different subtask of a complex jointdesign problem in advance of the collaborative activity. Thesedifferent training tasks should predispose the two dyadmembers to adopt different perspectives, issues, and designstrategies, thus generating greater cognitive diversity for thegroup. In the other group condition (Shared Knowledge) bothdyad participants experienced the same training involvingboth subtasks. Task performance results show a group versusindividual advantage in performance, but a non-significantdifference in performance between the two group knowledgediversity conditions. The group knowledge manipulation didaffect group process, as measured by time spentcollaborating, number of turns taken, and number of wordsspoken. The findings suggest that group diversity canpromote individual learning and transfer when sufficient timeis allowed for discussion and group work.