The role of personality, gender and interaction in a cooperative and in a computer supported collaborative learning task

A total of 62 subjects of an Italian school, from the 4th and the 5th elementary school level (about 9, 10 and 11 years old), participated in a study investigating the effects of personality, gender and two cooperative learning tasks in children interactive behaviours. In our study we have considered two particular forms of cooperative learning: collaborative peer learning and computer supported collaborative peer learning. In the first task, children, working in pairs, had access to one computer. The independent variables were the personality (extrovert, introvert and mediovert), the gender of the couples (male, female and mixed couples), and the type of the task (hypertext and questionnaire), a repeated measure’s factor. The dependent variables were the percentage of the time of the different interactive behaviours. Results have shown that personality clearly influence the way in which students interact when they work in pairs.