Improving students' problem-solving skills is a major goal for most science educators. While a large body of research on problem solving exists, assessment of meaningful problem solving is very difficult, particularly for courses with large numbers of students in which one-on-one interactions are not feasible. We have used a suite of software tools and pedagogies of small-group student collaborations to assess both student problem-solving strategies and student abilities as they change over time. This paper reports the use of these tools to probe the effectiveness of using small group interaction to improve problem solving.

Although problem solving is a major goal for most science educators, many still rely on the demonstration method as an approach to teach it. This remains the case even though most are not happy with the results. Using a web-based problem delivery system to track students’ performance, we have investigated the effects of collaborative learning, and concept mapping on student problem solving ability. We find that student ability in general can be improved by about 10% after a group problem solving intervention. Furthermore we find differences in improvement depending upon the students’ level of logical thinking and gender.

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