Constructing Part-task Congruent Representations to Support Coordination of Collaborative Problem-solving Tasks

Abstract

This study investigated whether constructing part-task congruent domain-specific representations supports teams in establishing and maintaining a shared understanding of the knowledge domain and negotiating about it. This better coordination of team' discussions was, in turn, expected to lead to better problem-solving performance. In triads secondary education students worked on a case-based business-economics problem in a predefined order, but differed in the representational tool(s) they received. In the matched condition, teams received the three tools in a part-task congruent manner. In the other three non-matched conditions, teams received one of the tools for all three part-tasks, thus a tool congruent to one part-task and incongruent for the other two. The results show that coordination processes were indeed better which might explain why teams in the matched condition performed better on the complex problem-solving task. However, similar results were obtained by teams who only received a tool for constructing causal representations for all part-tasks.