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PISA 2015 COLLABORATIVE PROBLEM-SOLVING FRAMEWORK

JULY 2017

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• DEFINING THE DOMAIN ............................................................................................................................
  • Collaborative problem solving .....................................................................................................................
• ORGANISATION OF THE DOMAIN...........................................................................................................
  • Collaborative problem-solving processes and factors affecting CPS ..........................................................
    • Problem-solving skills ..............................................................................................................................
    • Collaborative problem-solving skills and competencies ........................................................................
    • Overview of the domain .........................................................................................................................
    • Student background ................................................................................................................................
    • Context: Problem scenarios, team composition, task characteristics and medium ................................
• ASSESSING COLLABORATIVE PROBLEM-SOLVING COMPETENCY.............................................
  • Structure of the assessment ........................................................................................................................
  • Measurement of collaboration skills ..........................................................................................................
    • Conversational agents ............................................................................................................................
    • Collaborative problem-solving task types ..............................................................................................
    • Distribution of units and items ...............................................................................................................
    • Items and weighting for scoring .............................................................................................................
    • Evidence-centred design ........................................................................................................................
    • Considerations for computer delivery ....................................................................................................
    • Factors affecting item difficulty .............................................................................................................
  • Considerations for contextual questionnaire ..............................................................................................
  • Reporting proficiency in CPS ....................................................................................................................
• SUMMARY ..................................................................................................................................................
• GLOSSARY OF TERMS..............................................................................................................................
• APPENDIX A. STUDIES ON CONVERSATIONAL AGENTS ................................................................
• APPENDIX B. CPS LITERATURE REVIEW ............................................................................................
• APPENDIX C: PISA 2015 COLLABORATIVE PROBLEM SOLVING SAMPLE UNITS ......................
  • Purpose and scope of sample units ............................................................................................................
  • Sample CPS unit: The Aquarium ...............................................................................................................
  • Sample CPS unit: Class Logo ....................................................................................................................
• REFERENCES ..............................................................................................................................................

teams spread across different locations using collaborative technology (Kanter, 1994; Salas, Cooke and Rosen, 2008).

6. The University of Phoenix Research Institute identified virtual collaboration, i.e. the “ability to work productively, drive engagement, and demonstrate presence as a member of a virtual team” (Davis, Fidler and Gorbis, 2011, p. 12), as one of ten key skills for the future workforce. A recent Forrester report, based on a survey of information and knowledge-management decision makers from 921 North American and European enterprises, revealed that 94% had implemented or were going to implement some form of collaboration technologies, including e-mail, web conferencing, team workspaces, instant messaging or videoconferencing (Enterprise and SMB Software Survey, North America and Europe, Q42009 Forrester report). CPS skills are also needed in civic contexts, such as social networking, volunteering, participation in community life, and transactions with administration and public services. Thus, students emerging from schools into the workforce and public life will be expected to have collaborative problem-solving skills and the ability to collaborate using appropriate technology.
7. Collaboration among team members is crucial to the success of groups, families, corporations, public institutions, organisations and government agencies. One unco-operative member of a team can have serious negative consequences on team success. Skilled collaboration and social communication facilitate performance in the workplace (Klein, DeRouin and Salas, 2006; Salas, Cooke and Rosen, 2008), in engineering and software development (Sonnentag and Lange, 2002), and in interdisciplinary research among scientists (Nash et al., 2003). This is clearly apparent from the trend in research publications. Wuchty, Jones and Uzzi (2007) examined 19.9 million papers over five decades and demonstrated that there has been an increase in publications by teams of authors. Moreover, papers drafted by teams of authors end up higher in citation indices than papers drafted by individual authors.
8. The competencies assessed in the PISA 2015 collaborative problem-solving assessment therefore need to reflect the skills found in project-based learning in schools and in collaboration in workplace and civic settings, as described above. In such settings, students are expected to be proficient in skills such as communicating, managing conflict, organising a team, building consensus and managing progress.
9. One major factor that contributes to the success of CPS is effective communication among team members (Dillenbourg and Traum, 2006; Fiore et al., 2010; Fiore and Schooler, 2004). Therefore, an important part of the assessment must be proficiency in communication: communicating the right information and reporting what actions have been taken to the right person at the right time. This allows students to build a shared understanding of the task. The competency includes considering the perspectives of other team members, tracking the knowledge of team members, and building and monitoring a shared understanding of the progress made on the task.
10. Students must also be able to establish and maintain effective team organisation. This includes understanding and assigning roles, and maintaining and adapting the organisation to be effective at achieving its goals. This includes handling disagreements, conflicts, obstacles to goals and potential negative emotions (Barth and Funke, 2010; Dillenbourg, 1999; Rosen and Rimor, 2009).
11. In addition, students need to understand the type of collaboration and associated rules of engagement. The ground rules are different in contexts of helping, collaborative work, consensus building, win-win negotiations, debates and hidden-profile jigsaw configurations (i.e_._ group members have different information that needs to be integrated to arrive at a solution).
12. Apart from defining the domain, the CPS framework has to propose a way to operationalise the construct through a computer-based assessment (CBA). The framework builds, in part, on the individual problem-solving framework for PISA 2012, but extends it substantially in order to cover the additional

concepts that need to be incorporated in order to develop and focus on the collaborative aspects of problem solving. The main elements of these aspects are group thinking and the communication skills required for effective interaction between group and individual thinking.

13. The CPS framework incorporates definitions and theoretical constructs that are based on research and best practices from several areas where CPS-related skills have been assessed. These areas include computer-supported co-operative work, team-discourse analysis, knowledge sharing, individual problem solving, organisational psychology, and assessment in work contexts (e.g. military teams, corporate leadership). The framework further incorporates information from existing assessments that can inform the PISA 2015 CPS assessment, including Assessment and Teaching of 21st-Century Skills (ATC21s), problem solving in the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), Partnership for 21st-Century Skills, and the PISA 2012 individual problem-solving assessment (see Appendix B for a review).
14. The operationalisation of the framework described in section four requires an understanding of the major theoretical and logistical underpinnings of an assessment. The framework cannot be developed independently of considerations of the assessment design and measurement requirements. It must take into account the types of technologies, tasks and assessment contexts in which it will be applied (Funke, 1998; Funke and Frensch, 2007). For assessment design, the framework must consider the kinds of constructs that can be reliably measured, and must provide valid inferences about the collaborative skills being measured and about their impact on success in today’s world. The CPS framework must also provide a basis for the development of computer-based assessments that will be used worldwide within the logistical constraints and time limits of an international assessment.
15. This document is organised into four sections. Following this introductory section, the section “Defining the domain” provides a definition of collaborative problem solving. The section “Organisation of the domain” describes how the domain of CPS is organised. It explains the skills and competencies needed for successful CPS and the factors that influence these skills. The section “Assessing collaborative problem-solving competency” operationalises the construct of CPS by identifying and justifying approaches to measuring CPS competencies and the contexts in which the skills can be assessed. It also describes the levels of proficiency for CPS and how they are reported. Appendix A provides a summary of studies with conversational agents in tasks that involve tutoring, collaborative learning, co-construction of knowledge, and collaborative problem solving. Appendix B provides a literature review of the key concepts in CPS related to the definition, constructs and design decisions of PISA 2015 CPS framework. Appendix C provides two CPS units that were developed as preliminary samples to illustrate the assessment framework and show how it might be operationalised.

22. Collaboration skills can be assessed at the individual, group, or organisational level (Campbell, 1968; Dillenbourg, 1999; Fiore et al., 2010; Stahl, 2006). An advantage of collaboration is that the output of the group in solving the problem can be greater than the sum of the outputs from individual members (Aronson and Patnoe, 1997; Dillenbourg, 1999; Schwartz, 1995) and the individual level of participants does not adequately characterise how the group as a whole produces different outcomes than individuals. Yet, for the purpose of the PISA assessment, the focus is on individual capacities within collaborative situations. The effectiveness of collaborative problem solving depends on the ability of group members to collaborate and to prioritise the success of the group over individual successes. At the same time, this ability is a trait in each of the individual members of the group.

…to effectively engage in a process…

23. Collaborative problem solving involves an individual’s cognitive processing that engages both cognitive and social skills. There are individual problem-solving processes as well as communication processes that interact with the cognitive systems of the other participants in the collaboration. For example, the group must not only have the correct solution but must also agree that it is the correct solution. As discussed later in this document, the focus of the assessment is the cognitive and social skills related to CPS to establish and maintain shared understanding, to take appropriate actions to solve the problems, and to establish and maintain group organisation.
24. The cognitive processes involved in CPS are internal to the individual but they are also manifested in the interactions with the problem and with others in the group. That is, cognitive processes can be inferred from the actions performed by the individual, communications made to others, intermediate and final products of the problem-solving tasks, and open-ended reflections on problem-solving representations and activities. These measures can be instantiated by examining exploration and solving strategies, the type and quality of communication generated, probes of the knowledge and representation of the problem, and indicators of an individual’s representation of others in the group. In other words, measuring collaborative problem-solving skills is not only a challenge comparable to measuring individual skills, but also a great opportunity to make observable the cognitive processes engaged by team members.

…whereby two or more agents …

25. Collaboration requires interactions between two or more agents. The word “agent” refers to either a human or a computer-simulated participant. In both cases, an agent has the capability of generating goals, performing actions, communicating messages, reacting to messages from other participants, sensing its environment, adapting to changing environments, and learning (Franklin and Graesser, 1996). The success of CPS skills can be observed at either an individual level or a group level. Even when observations are directed at an individual level, they refer to the individual’s actions and interaction enacted in order to share a representation or common goal with at least one other agent for there to be collaboration. The definition therefore sets the requirement of a minimum of two agents.

…attempt to solve a problem…

26. The measurement is focused primarily on the collaborative actions the students engage in while trying to solve the problem at hand, rather than solely on the correct solution of the problem. The core construct weighs collaboration processes higher than the solutions to problems.

…by sharing the understanding and effort required to come to a solution...

27. Collaboration can only occur if the group members strive for building and maintaining a shared understanding of the task and its solutions. Shared understanding is achieved by constructing a common ground (Clark, 1996; Clark and Brennan, 1991; Fiore and Schooler, 2004) through communication and

interaction, such as building a shared representation of the meaning of the problem, understanding each individual’s role, understanding the abilities and perspectives of group members, mutual tracking of the transfer of information and feedback among group members, and mutual monitoring of progress towards the solution.

…and pooling their knowledge, skills and effort to reach that solution.

28. Collaboration further requires that each individual establish how their own knowledge and skills can contribute to solving the problem as well as identify and appreciate the knowledge and skills that the other participant(s) can contribute. In addition to establishing the state of the pooled knowledge and skills within the group, there are potential differences in points of view, dissension/conflict among group members, errors committed by group members in need of repair, and other challenges in the problem that require cognitive effort to handle. This additional effort of justifying, defending, arguing and reformulating is a factor that may explain why groups sometimes achieve more or are more efficient than individuals: they have to be explicit about their opinion, interpretations and suggestions requiring them to process available information more deeply, to compare more solutions, and to find out the weaknesses of each solution. If there is no effort from an individual, then that individual is not collaborating. The individual is not expending productive effort if the individual does not respond to requests or events and does not take actions that are relevant to any progress towards goals.

immediately obvious. It includes the willingness to engage with such situations in order to achieve one’s potential as a constructive and reflective citizen” (OECD, 2010, p. 12).

33. The 2012 individual problem-solving framework identifies three conceptual dimensions that provide the basis for the assessment of problem solving and are also relevant to CPS. These are the problem context , the nature of the problem situation , and the problem-solving process (OECD, 2010, p. 16).
34. The problem context affects how difficult a problem will be to solve for individuals who have varying familiarity with the context. The 2012 individual problem-solving framework posits two aspects of the problem-solving context, namely the setting (whether or not it is based on technology) and the focus (whether it is personal or social). When the setting is based on technology, individual problem solvers make use of a technological device as a context for their problem solving, such as a computer, cell phone or remote control. The typical problem-solving goal in this context is understanding how to control or troubleshoot the device. Other problem-solving contexts do not make use of such devices. The non- technology contexts include route planning, task scheduling, and decision making (OECD, 2010, p. 17). The focus of the problem solving is classified as personal when it relates mainly to the individual being assessed, the person’s family, or the person’s peers. A social focus, on the other hand, is broader in the sense that it refers to a context in the wider community or society at large.
35. The nature of the problem situation describes whether the information about the problem situation is complete or not when initially presented to the problem solver. Those problem situations that are complete in their information are referred to as static problem situations. When it is necessary for the problem solver to explore the problem situation in order to obtain additional information that was not provided at the onset, the problem situation is referred to as interactive. Problem situations may also vary with respect to the degree to which the starting state of the problem, the goal state, and the actions that can be performed to achieve the goal state are specified. Problem situations for which there are clearly specified goals, given states, and legal actions can be labelled well-defined problems; in contrast, problems that involve multiple goals in conflict with underspecified given states and actions are called ill-defined problems. The PISA 2012 problem-solving assessment and the problem solving in technology-rich environments assessment that is part of the Survey of Adult Skills, a product of the OECD Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), presented both well-defined and ill-defined problems (OECD, 2010, 2009).
36. The PISA 2012 individual problem-solving framework identified the following four cognitive processes in individual problem solving: exploring and understanding; representing and formulating; planning and executing; and monitoring and reflecting (OECD, 2010, p. 20-21). Similar processes were also identified in the PIAAC problem solving in technology-rich environments framework, with the latter being more focused on processes related to the acquisition, use and production of information in computerised environments (OECD, 2009). The CPS framework builds on the previous assessments of individual problem solving with these cognitive processes.
37. The first process involves understanding the problem situation by interpreting initial information about the problem and any information that is uncovered during exploration and interactions with the problem. In the second process, this information is selected, organised, and integrated with prior knowledge. This is accomplished by representing the information using graphs, tables, symbols and words, and then formulating hypotheses by identifying the relevant factors of the problem and critically evaluating information. The third process includes planning, which consists of clarifying the goal of the problem, setting any subgoals, and developing a plan to reach the goal state. Executing the plan that was created is also a part of this process. The final process consists of monitoring steps in the plan to reach the goal state and reflecting on possible solutions and critical assumptions.

38. These four problem-solving processes provide a basis for the development of the cognitive strand of the conjoint dimension of the CPS framework. In collaborative problem solving, the group must perform these problem-solving processes concurrently with a set of collaborative processes.

activities (Cannon-Bowers and Salas, 2001; Dillenbourg, 1999; Dillenbourg and Traum, 2006; Fiore and Schooler, 2004). This includes the student’s ability to monitor how his or her abilities, knowledge, and perspectives interact with those of the other agents and in relation to the task. Theories of discourse processing have emphasised the importance of establishing a common ground in order for communication to be successfully achieved (Clark, 1996; Clark and Brennan, 2001), so this is also a skill that is essential to CPS. Students must also be able to establish, monitor and maintain the shared understanding throughout the problem-solving task by responding to requests for information, sending important information about tasks completed, establishing or negotiating shared meanings, verifying what each other knows, and taking actions to repair deficits in shared knowledge. These skills involve the student’s own self-awareness of proficiencies in performing the task, recognising their own strengths and weaknesses in relationship to the task (metamemory), and recognising the other agents’ strengths and weaknesses (transactive memory).

2) Taking appropriate action to solve the problem. Students must be able to identify the type of CPS activities that are needed to solve the problem and to follow the appropriate steps to achieve a solution. This includes efforts to understand the problem constraints, create team goals for the solution, take action on the tasks, and monitor the results in relation to the group and problem goals. These actions may include communication acts, such as explaining, justifying, negotiating, debating and arguing in order for complex information and perspectives to be transferred and for more creative or optimal solutions to be achieved. The constraints and rules of engagement differ for the different types of CPS activities, such as jigsaw problems (where individuals have different knowledge that needs to be pooled; Aronson and Patnoe, 1997), collaborative work (Rosen and Rimor, 2009), and argumentative debates in decision making (Stewart, Setlock and Fussell, 2007). A proficient collaborative problem solver is able to recognise these constraints, follow the relevant rules of engagement, troubleshoot problems and evaluate the success of the problem-solving plan.

3) Establishing and maintaining group organisation. A team cannot function effectively without organising the group and adapting the structure to the problem-solving task. Students must be able to understand their own role and the roles of the other agents, based on their knowledge of who is skilled at what in the team (transactive memory), follow the rules of engagement for their role, monitor the group organisation, and facilitate changes needed to handle communication breakdowns, obstacles to the problem and performance optimisation. Some problem situations need a strong leader in the group whereas other problems require a more democratic organisation. A competent student can take steps to ensure that agents are completing tasks and communicating important information. This includes providing feedback and reflecting on the success of the group organisation in solving the problem.

42. Underlying these three competencies are specific skills that can be individually assessed within collaborative tasks. The assessment is developed ensuring that the skills shown in the 12 cells of the CPS matrix (Table 1) are all measured across different tasks. Together the assessment tasks cover the three major competencies and the four component processes.

Overview of the domain

43. Figure 1 provides a schema of the salient factors that influence collaborative problem-solving competency, as well as the cognitive and social processes that comprise the skills within collaborative problem-solving contexts, as defined for PISA 2015. The core skills are described above; additional details on the role of student background and task-context factors are provided below.

Figure 1. Overview of factors and processes for collaborative problem solving in PISA 2015

 Establishing and maintaining shared understanding

 Taking appropriate action to solve the problem

 Establishing and maintaining team organisation

Collaborative problem-solving competencies

Problem scenario

ScenariosContent/Do

main

 Task type  Settings  Domain content

Medium

 Semantic richness  Referentiality  Problem space 

Team composition

 Symmetry of roles  Symmetry of status  Size of group

Task characteristics

 Openness  Information availability  Interdependancy  Symmetry of goals 

Problem-solving skills

 Explore and understand  Represent and formulate  Plan and execute  Monitor and reflect

Collaborative skills

 Grounding  Explanation  Co-ordination  Filling roles

 Perspective taking  Audience design  Argumentation  Mutual regulation

Prior knowledge

 Mathematics  Reading and writing  Science and environment  Everyday learning

Characteristics

 Dispositions and attitudes  Experience and knowledge  Motivation  Cognitive ability

Student background Core skills

Context

Context: Problem scenarios, team composition, task characteristics and medium

48. The problem scenarios and context in which the problem is solved have a number of psychological dimensions that can affect the type of collaboration and the collaborative competencies employed. These dimensions specify the context of the problem to be solved, the availability of information, the relationships among the group members, and the types of problems.
49. A meaningful collaborative interaction and motivating experience in assessment does not emerge spontaneously, but requires careful structuring of the collaboration to promote constructive interactions. For example, effective collaboration is characterised by a relatively symmetrical structure with respect to knowledge, status and goals (Dillenbourg, 1999), but the roles and tasks of the different group members may be very different. Symmetry of knowledge occurs when all participants have roughly the same level of knowledge, although they may have different perspectives. Symmetry of status involves collaboration among peers rather than interactions involving facilitator relationships. Finally, symmetry of goals involves common group goals rather than individual goals that may conflict (Rosen and Rimor, 2009).
50. Assessment items are designed so that successful performance on the task requires collaboration and interdependency among the participants. For example, in many types of problems (i.e_._ , jigsaw, hidden profile [when the information available to the human is not complete at the beginning of the task]), each team member has a piece of information and only together can they solve the problem. These problems are dynamic rather than static because important information accrues during the course of interacting with others. Moreover, problems are designed to provide a graceful degradation of the quality of the solution, so partial or suboptimal solutions receive partial credit. Another example consists of consensus-building tasks, where there are limited resources but a group must bargain and converge on a solution that satisfies the needs of different stakeholders. Information among participants may also conflict, requiring sharing and then resolving the information in order to determine what information best solves the problem (debate).
51. The assessment items also consider the types of problems that groups of young people must solve, both within a formal school setting and in work contexts in order to be productive in society. A problem scenario provides the situational context in which a problem is applied. For example, within a consensus-building task, a classroom scenario may involve reaching a solution on how to prepare a PowerPoint presentation in a class when students bring different information to the group. Another scenario may be a negotiation task that involves global policies of citizens in a culture, such as a debate on where to build a new school.
52. The medium of a CPS item defines aspects such as its richness, referentiality and cost of grounding. For example, an item can be graphically rich, providing an immersive environment that simulates a classroom or workplace, or it could be a simple interface providing only a text description of a problem and means to communicate with the group. An item’s context may have high referentiality to the outside world and real-world contexts, versus being more abstract, with little reference to external knowledge. An item can have a greater or lesser degree of cost of grounding, depending on how easy it is for members of the group to communicate with each other and find common ground. Finally, an item can have a shared problem space where the actions of each team member are explicitly apparent, such as when working on a shared document; in other scenarios, information about team members’ actions might be implicit, for example, when working on separate tasks and reporting back to the group via the communication channel.
53. The 2012 individual problem-solving framework provides a structure for considerations of aspects of task characteristics, such as ill-defined vs. well-defined, and static vs. dynamic problems. Collaborative problem solving tends to be inherently interactive, interdependent and dynamic (Blech and

Funke, 2005, 2010; Klieme, 2004; Wirth and Klieme 2004). This provides greater challenges to assessment methods as there is much less control over the progress towards solutions, a much wider range of potential problem states, and complexities in tracking problem states. To the extent that any individual in a group depends on other individuals, there is some level of uncertainty in the control over the tasks, making it difficult for most problem types to be fully defined. Thus, a problem may be well-defined from the standpoint of the designer of the problem, but ill-defined at some points from the perspective of one or more group participants. Most or all of the problems also have different phases that can reflect variations in these context dimensions.

54. Table 2 elaborates the schematic representation of Figure 1 by providing an overview of the context dimensions and states that can affect the difficulty of the CPS task. In the context of a PISA assessment, it is impossible to assess all of the factors shown in Table 2, let alone the large number of combinations of factors; therefore the CPS assessment items constitute a sampling of the total domain by keeping many factors fixed and varying only a few. The framework identifies those factors that are most central to the definition of CPS. More specifically, PISA 2015 CPS concentrates on the collaboration skills to a greater extent than the problem-solving skills needed to solve the particular problem. Consequently, problems vary across low, medium and high difficulty with respect to collaboration skills, while problem- solving skills range from low to medium difficulty.

Table 2. Collaborative problem-solving context dimensions

Context Dimension (^) States

Problem scenario

Task type e negotiation.g.^ Jigsaw, consensus building,

Settings

Private vs. public Technology vs. non-technology School (formal) vs. non-school (informal)

Domain content e environment, community, politics.g.^ Math, science, reading,

Team composition

Size of group 2 or more (including the student) Symmetry of status of team members Symmetrical vs. asymmetrical Symmetry of roles: Range of actions available to each team member

Symmetrical vs. asymmetrical

Task characteristics

Openness (c.f. PISA PS 2012) Well-defined vs. ill-defined Information availability: Does the student receive all necessary information at once? (c.f. PISA PS 2012)

Static vs. dynamic

Interdependency: Student A cannot solve problem without student B’s actions

Low to high

Symmetry of goals Group vs. individual Distance to solution (from beginning state to goal state)

Small, medium or large

Medium

Semantic richness Low to high Referentiality to the outside world Low to high Communication medium cost of grounding Interdependency: Student A cannot solve problem without student B’s actions

Low to high

Problem space: Does the student get information about other team members’ actions?

Explicit vs. implicit

timing information automatically captured during the field trial is used to determine the actual number of items that can be included in each unit and cluster for the main study.

Measurement of collaboration skills

61. Collaborative problem solving is inherently an interactive, conjoint, dual-strand process that considers how the student reasons about the problem and how the student interacts with others to regulate the social processes and exchange information. These complex processes present a challenge for consistent, accurate and reliable measurement across individuals and across user populations. The complexity of the potential collaborative interactions with the environment increases when there is an attempt to create compelling problem-solving situations in more realistic environments. Computer-based assessment provides an effective means to control the assessment contexts and to collect and analyse student performance. This level of control reduces the complexity in measurement and allows the assessment to be technically implementable. This section describes the focus of what is measured and how computer-based approaches are used.
62. PISA 2015 CPS is an assessment of individuals in collaborative problem-solving contexts. Because overall analyses for PISA are performed at the student level, the design reflects measuring individual competencies rather than the overall performance of the group process. The PISA 2015 CPS assessment is not designed to measure individuals’ cognitive problem-solving skills specifically, but it does do this to the extent that individual problem-solving skills are expressed through collaboration. As such, there is an indirect link to the 2012 individual problem-solving assessment. The 2015 measurement focuses on assessing the cognitive and social processes underlying collaborative problem-solving skills rather than specific domain knowledge.
63. The process of solving a problem in a collaborative situation in a computer-based assessment generates a complex data set that contains actions made by the team members, communication acts between the group members, and products generated by the individual and the group. Each can be associated with levels of proficiency for each CPS competency. Because the focus is on the individual, assessment items correspond to measures of the student’s outputs, whereas outputs from the rest of the group provide contextual information about the state of the problem-solving process.
64. Prior research and assessments in CPS have used a number of different methods to measure the quality of the problem-solving products (i.e. outcomes) and processes. These methods use varying approaches to assessing actions, communication and products, including measures of the quality of the solutions and objects generated during the collaboration (Avouris, Dimitracopoulou and Komis, 2003), analyses of log files (files to which a computer writes a record of student activities), quality of intermediate results, paths to the solutions (Adejumo et al., 2008), team processes and structure of interactions (O’Neil, Chung and Brown, 1997), quality and type of collaborative communication (Cooke et al., 2003, Foltz and Martin, 2008; Graesser et al., 2008), and quality of situation judgements (McDaniel et al., 2001). Additional details regarding research on measurement approaches applied to CPS are provided in Appendix B.
65. Individuals working collaboratively on a problem can change the state of a problem by communicating with each other or performing certain actions. For the purpose of the assessment, actions can be defined as any explicit acts made by the individual that change the state of the collaborative problem. These actions include individual acts, such as placing a puzzle piece, clicking on a button to start a jointly designed machine, moving a cursor on a display that the other participants can see, or editing a joint document. Each action can be mapped to measures of performance as it relates to either success (or failure) of solving the problem or to a skill identified within the framework. For example, placing a puzzle piece incorrectly indicates failure of enacting a plan (cell C2 of the skills matrix). Sequences of actions

provide deeper information about the problem-solving process. For example, the sequence of students’ actions in first varying one part of the problem, then verifying the solution and then taking the next appropriate action, can show skills of monitoring results and evaluating success (D2).

66. While communication is often classified as an individual collaboration skill, the output of communication provides a window into the cognitive and social processes related to all collaborative skills. Students must communicate to collaborate, and the communication stream is captured and analysed to measure the underlying processes. The analysis of the content and structure of communication streams provides measures of the test-taker’s ability to share perspectives, establish mutual goals, negotiate with other team members, and take steps to achieve these goals. For example, communication sent by the student indicating what the student sees on a screen provides an indication of building a shared representation (B1). Taking the initiative to ask other agents to manipulate parts of the problem corresponds to following rules of engagement (C3) and enacting plans (C2). Communication acts and sequences of communication acts can be classified to measure the type and quality of skills that are being enacted by the student.
67. The output or products of the team’s problem-solving process provides a third measure of student performance. A product can be based on intermediate and final solutions to the problem-solving process or the output of a “probe item” which checks a student’s understanding of a situation in a particular state. These provide a measure of the success that the actions of collaborative problem solving are being enacted properly and that the group is moving the problem state forward appropriately. The products can also be based on “probes” that are placed within the unit to assess a student’s cognitive state relative to the skills in the framework. These probes would stop the simulation and ask the student either a constructed-response or multiple-choice question in order to assess knowledge states, shared understanding and the student’s understanding of the other group members’ skills, abilities and perspectives. The questions range from small tests of the student’s state of understanding to situation judgement tasks that require students to put themselves in the context and communicate the state of the problem externally, such as writing an e-mail to a supervisor. Example probes are shown below.

Table 3. Example probes

Probe Skill assessed What does A know about what is on your screen? (A1) Discovering perspectives/abilities of team members

What information do you need from B? (C1) Communicating with team members about the actions being performed

Why is A not providing information to B? (D1) Monitoring and repairing the shared understanding

What task will B do next? (B2) Identifying and describing tasks to be completed

Who controls the factory inputs? (B3) Describin roles and team organisation

Write an e-mail to your supervisor explaining whether there is consensus of your group on what to do next.

(B1) Building a shared representation and negotiating the meaning of the problem (B2) Describing tasks to be completed Write an e-mail to your group explaining what actions the group will need to do to solve the problem.

(B2) Identifying and describing tasks to be completed (C2) Enacting plans

68. These explicit probes are one way of assessing students’ proficiencies, but much can be inferred from the particular actions and speech acts that do not explicitly probe these knowledge states. For example, if the student does not know whether another group member is aware of what the student has on his or her screen, the student can ask the member a question that targets the uncertainty. Alternatively, another member can perform an action on the screen and observe whether the student comments on an aberration. Physical acts in a shared physical space are acts of communication, just as words and sentences