A variety of peer learning environment designs to support effective collaborative learning has been attempted or proposed. The backbone of collaborative learning is the willingness of the peers to participate in collaboration in a constructive sense.
Effective collaboration requires appropriate pairing of collaborating peers.
There have been studies to identify the factors involved in combining peers. This supports the view that the collaborative peers should have almost equal knowledge levels to make the collaboration constructive. The contradiction in pairing of knowledge levels could be because of the difference in domains or characteristics of peers or the experimental setup. She also identified the intermediate variable that explains these variations. She found that effective adults involved the child in explicit decision making while skilled peers tended to dominate the decision making.