Mugny,“Resource interdependence, student interactions and performance in cooperative learning

Two studies were carried out during university workshops, and analyzed the effects of resource interdependence on student-student interactions, and the impact of these interac-tions on performance. Students worked cooperatively, either on complementary information (positive resource interdependence) or on identical information (resource independence). In Study 1, analysis of videotaped interactions revealed that working on complementary information produced more positive interactions; however this was not sufficient to prevent students who had no direct access to the information from being disadvantaged, because of informational dependence. In Study 2, with simpler texts allowing better information transmission, performance was favored when students worked on complementary infor-mation. Moreover, working on identical information not only enhanced confrontations of point of views, it also elicited competence threat. Further analysis revealed that competence threat mediated resource interdependence effect on performance. Discussion provides insights into the conditions in which different cooperative methods can benefit learning. Cooperation has been studied in various, sometimes very different, formats, resulting in rather divergent lines of research (Johnson & Johnson, 2002