  Collaboration is an important problem-solving skill; however, novice
collaboration generally benefits from some kind of support. One possibility for
supporting productive conversations between collaborators is to encourage pairs
of students to provide explanations for their problem-solving steps. To test
this possibility, we contrasted individuals who were instructed to self-explain
problem-solving steps with dyads who were instructed to jointly explain
problem-solving steps in the context of an intelligent tutoring system (ITS).
The results suggest that collaboratively developed explanations prompted
students to remediate their errors in dialog, as opposed to relying on the ITS
for assistance, which is provided in the form of on-demand hints. The paper
concludes with a discussion about implications for combining proven learning
interventions.
