Mediating Group Search: Lessons from a Middle School Study.

The article focuses on the benefits and drawbacks of group collaboration and group work in online research in education. It addresses the role of collaborative search tasks and group research in the development of problem-solving skills, learning, and information searching. The author discusses a study done in a middle school in which the success of group collaboration in research was explored by comparing the results of a classroom of individual researchers and a classroom of group researchers. Topics include the cognitive effects of group searching, the phenomenon of groupthink in collaborative research, and the role of student social status in achieving correct answers in research groups.