Characterizing Interactive Communications in Computer-Supported Collaborative Problem-Solving Tasks: A Conditional Transition Profile Approach

Abstract

Communication in a collaborative problem-solving activity plays a pivotal role in the success of the collaboration in both academia and the workplace. Computer-supported collaboration makes it possible to collect large-scale communication data to investigate the process at a finer granularity. In this paper, we introduce a conditional transition profile (CTP) to characterize aspects of each team member's communication. Based on the data from a large-scale empirical study, we found that participants in the same team tend to show similar CTP compared to participants from different teams. We also found that team members who showed more “negotiation” after the partner “shared” information tended to show more improvement after the collaboration while those who continued sharing ideas while their partners were negotiating tended to improve less.

Cross-Disciplinary Research on Learning and Instruction – Coming to Terms

“…Collaborative problem solving involves cognitive skills, such as defining the problem at hand and social skills, such as establishing a shared understanding (Graesser et al, 2018). Regarding the collaborative problem-solving process, four skills are considered to be of major relevance (Liu et al, 2016;Hao and Mislevy, 2019):…”

“…We introduce a conceptualization of how ideas and concepts from the field of collaborative problem solving are useful to address challenges that arise from cross-disciplinary research (see Figure 1 ). The conceptualization is based on existing approaches to cross-disciplinary research (e.g., Epstein, 2014 ; O’Donnell and Derry, 2014 ; Hall et al, 2018 , 2019 ) and extends these approaches by introducing processes and skills from collaborative problem solving ( Hao and Mislevy, 2019 ; Hao et al, 2019 ).…”

“…Collaborative problem solving involves cognitive skills, such as defining the problem at hand and social skills, such as establishing a shared understanding ( Graesser et al, 2018 ). Regarding the collaborative problem-solving process, four skills are considered to be of major relevance ( Liu et al, 2016 ; Hao and Mislevy, 2019 ): (1) Sharing ideas refers to how individuals bring divergent ideas into a collaborative process ( Liu et al, 2016 ). (2) Negotiating ideas refers to building collaborative knowledge and constructing processes within a group.…”

External Correlates of Adult Digital Problem-Solving Process

“…Furthermore, analyses of behavioral characteristics associated with successful/unsuccessful final performance (e.g., Gao, Cui, et al, 2022; Gao, Zhai, et al, 2022; Greiff et al, 2015; He & von Davier, 2016; Qiao & Jiao, 2018; Qiao et al, 2023; Ulitzsch et al, 2021, 2023) can inform test validation and automated scoring. Exploratory analyses of action sequences or sequence-derived patterns, often with cluster analysis (Eichmann et al, 2020; He et al, 2019; Gao, Cui, et al, 2022; Gao, Zhai, et al, 2022; He, Borgonovi, & Suárez-Álvarez, 2023; Hao & Mislevy, 2019; Ulitzsch et al, 2022) or with topic modeling of actions or subsequences (Fang & Ying, 2020; Xu et al, 2018), have revealed different behavioral prototypes among the examinees as they face the same task, providing insights on how individuals navigate and approach computerized tests, digital platforms encountered in daily life, collaborative problems, etc. Hidden Markov and neural language models applied to action sequences have also been shown to reveal stages or subtasks for solving a problem (Wang et al, 2023; Xiao et al, 2021; Xu et al, 2020).…”

Behavioral patterns in collaborative problem solving: a latent profile analysis based on response times and actions in PISA 2015

“…Indeed, analyzing test-takers' process data makes it possible to understand the characteristics of performance in depth, for instance, how 15-year-old students interacted in problem spaces, such as incorrect responses despite overall effective strategies or correct responses that relied on guessing (He et al, 2022;Teig et al, 2020). However, such studies are still in the embryonic stage and have mostly revolved around the relatively small-to medium-scale assessments with the human-to-human approach (i.e., H-H approach), which entails naturalistic collaboration with people (e.g., Andrews-Todd et al, 2018;Dowell et al, 2018;Han & Wilson, 2022;Hao & Mislevy, 2019;Hu & Chen, 2022). Little research has been carried out on the process data from large-scale assessments that have used the H-A approach, such as the one employed in PISA 2015.…”