Facilitating group work through collaboration instructions using a digital environment

Facilitating effective group collaboration is a major challenge in contemporary educational and professional contexts, and digital environments may support this goal by structuring collaborative processes through explicit instructions. The present experimental study examined the effects of collaboration instructions based on constructive controversy principles on group collaboration. These instructions were delivered via a digital environment during an initial training task. Both immediate effects on the training task and delayed effects on a subsequent transfer task were assessed. Measures included group performance (synergy), perceptions of group processes (epistemic and relational conflict regulation), perceived social skills, and communication behaviors. Results indicated that the collaboration instructions positively affected conflict regulation processes and group synergy during the training task only. In addition, perceived social skills and communication behaviors increased from the training task to the transfer task, but only for groups that received the instructions. Overall, these findings suggest that providing structured collaboration instructions through a digital environment can enhance group collaboration and, to a lesser extent, support the development of social skills and communication behaviors across tasks.