When students solve a problem collaboratively, they maintain some representation of their partners' goals, knowledge and understanding. This mutual model may be not highly detailed, nor explicit, but is still necessary to build a shared understanding. An alternative view is that learners construct a model of the group interactions as a whole. In both cases, this modeling increases the co-learners' cognitive activity. Our main hypothesis is that this modeling activity leads co-learners to think more deeply about the task and hence to improve their knowledge. This new project will be carried out in collaboration with 4 European countries. It is funded by the Swiss Science Foundation, in partnership with the European Science Foundation. The project will begin in Spring 2005
announcement by Pierre Dillenbourg