About "collective intelligence"



Picture from
 http://ldele087.wordpress.com/2010/01/29/collective-intelligence/ 

The report called "Evidence for a collective intelligence factor in the performance of human groups" (Woolley, et al., 2010) demonstrated to us statistical evidence of the existence of "collective intelligence", and its exploratory power over a group's performance on a wide variety of tasks. The two studies presented in the report showed that while individual intelligence was a significant predictor of performance on tasks which were completed by individuals, average individual intelligence was not as significantly associated with performance on group tasks as collective intelligence. What was more interesting was that, instead of factors such as group cohesion, motivation, and satisfaction which one might have expected to have strong correlation with group performance, average social sensitivity, the equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking, and the proportion of females in the group turned out to be some of the best predictors for collective intelligence which could be used to account for a big proportion of variance across group performances. Although the studies reported were not directly related to second language teaching and learning, I think their results could still be beneficial and valuable for language instructors in the process of designing classroom activities, intercultural exchanges, assigning tasks and roles, as well as administering and monitoring any student activities which involve group work. However, as language learning could be a very different cognitive and social process, and the meaning negotiation and construction as well as information processing and internalization in language acquisition might differ immensely across learners of different levels, ages, cultures, and languages, more evidence would be needed to help with a better configuration and implementation of group projects in a language learning context for achieving better results.