Joanne, I don't know that you were looking for hypotheses (nor do I know anything about how your workshops are structured except from your brief description), but here are a few thoughts: * It's helpful for students to see what other students do/don't understand; in particular, it helps them persist w/ difficult material if they know that others also find it difficult (because students often assume that everyone else understands the concept in question and if they don't undertand it, they're stupid). *Trying to put their thinking into words can give students a better sense of what they do and don't understand. * It's helpful for students to share their thinking w/ each other; they get to hear how others approach a given problem, they can share suggestions from their various TAs, ... * Spending time in workshops with other students helps students connect their social and academic lives. Note: Uri Treisman identified some of these factors in the research that lead him to design the Emerging Scholars model of calculus workshops (although from your brief description, your workshops have a different structure than Emerging Scholars workshops). And given your research interests, you might want to join the RUME list (RUME = Research on Undergraduate Math Ed; it's a Special Interest Group of the MAA); see http://betterfilecabinet.com/mailman/listinfo/rume_betterfilecabinet.com for more info. Dara