Learning performance in collaborative and non-collaborative groups in a virtual environment

Nowadays the virtual community represents an environment suitable to generate social dynamics and to promote collaborative learning and the civic engagement of young people. This paper describes a study aimed to investigate the effects that a small group has on the individual and collaborative remembering. In our study, a chat was used to simulate a virtual environment (VE), which allowed us to study the dynamics of human social behavior. The purpose of the experiments was not the examination of task performance, but the description of various aspects of the social interactions among group members, and the check of the possible group influence at a reasoning or encoding level.