One Attempt to Measure Collaboration Between Students During Group Work

Contribution Collaborative problem-solving (CPS) skills have become an inevitable part of workforce readiness in contemporary society (Graesser et al., 2018). Numerous studies have shown that CPS is a powerful learning tool that could lead to more creative, efficient and comprehensive solutions than other approaches (Fiore, 2008). Sometimes it is the only possible way to solve complex problems. That is not surprising that the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD, 2019) includes the development of collaboration skills in the education development agenda for 2030. A lot of attempts were made to introduce CPS in everyday educational practice. However, the benefits of the CPS often fail to be achieved (Le et al., 2018). Collaborative problem-solving is usually defined as working together toward a common goal (Hesse et al., 2015). It includes interdependency between group members in joint activity and shared responsibility for the group results. Despite many contributions, there is a lack of instruments for measuring student-specific versions of collaborative processes during group work (Wang et al., 2009). The focus is often on the effect of this type of learning assessed through achievement data (Jansen, 2010) while the quality of the collaborative process is beyond research aims. Usually, self-assessment tools were used for this purpose accompanied by methodological limitation of subjective assessments. In these attempts, students' perceptions and experience with CPS are not distinguished from the quality of collaboration present during group work. Also, collaboration is assessed as an individual skill separate from its nature as a joint activity. This study aims to construct an instrument for assessing the quality of collaboration between students while trying to solve a complex problem. This study is part of the larger project PEERSovers with a focus on designing an evidence-based training program for enhancing high-school students' collaborat