Student learning could become more effective and productive if students collaborate by exchanging concepts, comparing individual learning strategies and debating each others’ contributions to the learning process (De Corte, Greer, & Verschaffel, 1996). The process of collaboration should stimulate students to explicate and formulate their thoughts more clearly. Moreover, these kinds of interactions should initiate students’ reflections on their learning and thinking. Supporting this kind of effective learning and reflection on the metacognitive aspects of learning is becoming extremely important in the context of the paradigm shift by which education is confronted by the changing demands of society. This is because society is becoming more and more knowledge intensive. For instance, a simple tomato that we eat still looks the same as in former days. However, its production has become enormously more knowledge intensive as a consequence of the intensity of the production and the effort to make the product less sensitive to pathogens and less perishable. © 2001 by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
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