INTERACTION PATTERNS AND FACILITATION OF PEER LEARNING Two Replications

Individuals who possess special abilities, skills, and knowledge relative to the group task have the potential to make important contributions to group performance. The degree to which this potential is realized depends on the behaviors of those persons. These behaviors are determined, in part, by the individual char-acteristics of group members (Mann, 1959; Bouchard, 1969) and in part by the particular assembly of persons (Rosenberg et al., 1955). The important question, however, is what kinds of be-haviors influence performance in groups. In an earlier study (Shaw et al., 1979), an attempt was made to identify some of the behaviors of group members that are related to their own per-formance and to the performance of other group members. The results supported the hypothesis that giving information, ideas, and opinions to the group is positively correlated with the per-ception by others in the group that the member is facilitating group performance, whereas asking for information and opinions is positively related to objective measures of facilitation of group performance. AUTHORS ’ NOTE: We wish to express our deep appreciation to the University o