Abstracts - Earli

their classmates and teachers to be an important factor contributing to their engagement, interestand well-being. However, only few studies have looked into the factors which might influence thesense of relatedness. This study of 499 primary school children and 31 teachers explored therelationship between child and teacher characteristics and relatedness. At the beginning of the firstprimary school year the IQ and social competence of the children were assessed. In the middle ofthe second school year sense of relatedness in the children and teacher efficacy regardingclassroom-management were measured. The data were analyzed using a multilevel approach.Although the scores for relatedness were generally high, the results showed that sense ofrelatedness varied significantly across the classes. Sense of relatedness was predicted by sex, IQand social competence of the child as well by teacher efficacy. Girls reported significantly higherlevels of relatedness. Social competence as well as teacher efficacy predicted sense of relatednesspositively. Contrary to expectations sense of relatedness was negatively related with IQ.Additional explorative analyses showed that there were significant interactions between IQ andsex and between IQ and social competence. For boys and for children with lower socialcompetence scores the effects of IQ were stronger than for girls and for socially competentchildren. Implications for future research regarding these relationships are discussed.P 1001 September 2007 11:00 - 12:20Room: 3.67 BékésyPaper SessionCollaborative learningChair:Kristiina Kumpulainen, University of Helsinki, FinlandInstructional support for the generation of new shared knowledge in collaborative problem solvingAnne Meier, University of Freiburg, GermanyHans Spada, University of Freiburg, GermanyGroups of learners and problem solvers can profit greatly from pooling and integrating theirmembers’ complementary knowledge. In particular, new knowledge can be built at the group levelby drawing inferences from the information contributed by individuals. Unfortunately, groups tendto focus on information that is known to all members from the start (shared knowledge) andneglect members’ unique (unshared) knowledge. Experimental research on the effects ofinformation sharedness on group discussion, however, has so far focused on the mere pooling ofinformation and neglected higher levels of information processing, i.e. the collaborativeconstruction of new knowledge. The present study therefore investigated whether biases towardsshared information can also be found at the level of inferences, and explored two kinds ofinstructional support for overcoming such biases. Student dyads collaborated via a desktop videoconferencingsystem on a murder mystery task requiring them to draw inferences from both sharedand unshared pieces of information. Three experimental conditions were realized: A controlcondition was compared to two instructed conditions which were informed about typical taskdifficulties, and either planned their own collaboration (planning condition), or received externalguidance from a collaboration script (script condition). Data collection has not yet been completed,but dialog analyses for the currently available 12 dyads already revealed the expected biases:dyads pooled more shared than unshared information, and also drew more inferences from shared– 841 –