Defining Collaborative Problem Solving

• In Event: 53.033 - Investigating the Inclusion of Collaborative Problem Solving in the Nation's Report Card

Abstract

In industry, academia, and government, there is a growing emphasis on collaborative projects requiring a team to address complex phenomena. The importance of collaborative problem solving (CPS) in the workplace has been expanding as societies and workplaces become more knowledge-dependent and more influenced by digital technology. Organizations are increasingly invested in collaborative work to accelerate progress towards solving many multifaceted and challenging educational, environmental, social, and public health problems. The assumption is that group collaboration is essential because some problem solving tasks are too complex for an individual to work through alone or the solution will be improved from the joint capacities of a team.
More specifically, CPS requires that people share their resources and their strategies in order to reach a common goal via some sort of communication process. The group convenes either face-to-face or virtually. In both cases, some level of technology is almost always used to facilitate collaborative problem solving. Having clear assessments that identify effective CPS strategies can provide valuable information regarding students’ ability to negotiate and resolve problems as a group and, as such, possess a key 21st Century Skill.
This presentation will outline existing CPS assessment frameworks, such as that used in Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and the Assessing and Teaching 21st Century Skills (ATC21S) project. PISA focuses on core collaborative competencies addressing sharing, understanding and proactively identifying problems and appropriately addressing them. ATC21S considers somewhat analogous social factors having to do with participating in the process and taking appropriate perspectives, all the while regulating the interaction. Both contextualize these skills within problem solving via attention to cognitive or knowledge based factors.
In looking across these two CPS frameworks, there is one fundamental distinction: the degree to which they separate the social dimensions of collaboration from the task of problem solving (PISA) as opposed to the perspective that an intermingling of the social and cognitive processes (ATC21S) is necessary for effective problem solving. On the one hand, with PISA, we have a clear differentiation between a focus on the problem solving task and a focus on collaboration in the problem solving context (OECD, 2013). On the other hand, with ATC21S, we have an integrated approach where the distinctions between collaboration and problem solving are melded (Griffin, McGaw, & Care, 2012).
For the purposes of defining collaborative problem solving for the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the model must consider the aforementioned frameworks. However, there are other collaborative problem solving frameworks that should be considered that have not been designed explicitly for assessments, such as group communication theory (Bowers, Jentsch, Salas, & Braun, 1998), macrocognition in teams (Letsky, Warner, Fiore, & Smith, 2008), and teamwork competencies(Bowers & Cannon-Bowers, 2014). As such, this presentation will also touch on some of these other frameworks, as well as other aspects such as domain specificity of knowledge, team reflectivity, and problem identification.

Author

• Stephen M. Fiore, University of Central Florida