Designing an Online Collaborative Mathematics Task to Support Students' Collaborative Problem-Solving Skills

• In Event: The Design of Collaborative Activities Across Disciplines to Promote Student Learning and Agency

Abstract

Collaborative problem solving (CPS) is becoming increasingly important for career and academic success (Graesser et al., 2018). Specifically, societal changes (e.g., technological advances, the COVID-19 pandemic) have reshaped the way we live and work. These changes have motivated the need for learning and assessment activities to measure CPS skills and support opportunities for individuals to engage in collaborative activities which can support learning of content at a deeper level (Smith et al., 2009). In the current project, we designed an online mathematics task that could support CPS activities. We further sought to explore the nature of interactions among team members during task engagement and the extent to which certain item characteristics might elicit particular interaction patterns.
The online mathematics task, called the T-Shirt Math Task, deals with concepts associated with linear equations and was intentionally designed to elicit communication and collaboration between two individuals working together on the task. In the task, students are presented with a problem statement in which a school student council is planning to sell T-shirts to the eighth-grade class and is considering three different companies for purchasing the T-shirts. Students are tasked with determining which of the three companies would be the best choice for purchasing the T-shirts given a maximum number of students who would be making purchases. The task has 10 items, three constructed response, four dropdown, and three multiple-choice items.
Forty-eight students (24 dyads) in grades 7 through 9 (33 females, 15 males) completed the T-Shirt Math task through video and audio communication channels. Both students in each dyad could control the cursor and type answer choices. Video data were coded for the presence of five interaction patterns, with each of the 10 task items for each dyad characterized as reflecting one pattern (Kappa = .87). The interaction patterns were collaborative (robust interaction between teammates), cooperative (division of labor), dominant/dominant (unwillingness to compromise), dominant/passive, and expert/novice (Tan et al., 2010).
We found that the cooperative interaction pattern was the most frequently observed pattern (50.6%) followed by the collaborative interaction pattern (29.7%), dominant/passive interaction pattern (18.7%), dominant/dominant pattern (0.4%), and expert/novice pattern (0.4%). We further examined whether there was a relationship between display of interaction patterns and the item type and found no significant association (p = .19). We next examined whether display of interaction patterns would be associated with item difficulty which was operationalized according to mean item accuracy across the sample (items ≤ 50% correct were categorized as difficult). The relationship between interaction patterns and item difficulty was significant (p < .001). Specifically, there were more instances of the collaborative interaction pattern shown for difficult (80%) relative to easier (20%) items (p < .001), and in contrast, there were more instances of the cooperative interaction pattern shown for easier (51%) relative to difficult (49%) items (p = .001). These results shed light on how design decisions with respect to item characteristics can relate to how individuals interact in collaborative tasks, and offer insights into how we might design future collaborative activities.

Authors

• Jessica Andrews Todd, Educational Testing Service

• Monica Toscano