Effect of GSS on knowledge acquisition

The study discussed here investigated the contribution of group support system(s) (GSS) to a particular aspect of organizational learning: knowledge acquisition at the group level. We present a model explaining the enabling effects of GSS on important attributes of effective collaborative learning that lead to higher levels of knowledge acquisition and discuss the results of an empirical study designed to test the predictions of the model. A GSS-mediated environment is compared to a non-GSS collaborative environment in terms of the participants' understanding of a problem-solving task. The results indicate that the GSS-mediated environment leads to a significantly higher level of understanding than the non-GSS environment. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.