Collective Creativity Competencies and Collaborative Problem-Solving Outcomes: Insights from the Dialogic Interactions of Singapore Student Teams

Abstract

The dynamic and non-linear nature of twenty-first century skills and their constitutive interactional processes are posing significant challenges to conventional practices of teaching and assessment today. Despite notable international efforts in the teaching, learning and assessment of collaborative and creative problem-solving skills in recent years, clear empirical insights that illuminate the relationships between students’ creative competencies and their problem-solving success on ill-defined collaborative tasks remain elusive. Our chapter aims to address this knowledge gap by turning the lens of inquiry towards the interactional dialogic processes through which Singapore secondary school students accomplish their collaborative and creative problem-solving tasks. Using data generated from the ATC21S Singapore school trials, and drawing from theoretical and methodological advancements in the fields of creativity and collaborative problem-solving (CPS), we seek to explore the empirical relationships between collective creativity (CC) and CPS. This chapter outlines our conceptualisation and operationalisation of CC as a suite of metacognitive, cognitive and socio-communicative competencies, made manifest in the ‘talk-in-interaction’ of student teams as they engage in and accomplish their CPS tasks. We then use the proposed CC discourse-analytic framework and coding scheme to empirically examine how the features and patterns of dialogic interactions reflecting CC competencies statistically differ between successful and unsuccessful CPS student teams. In conclusion, we reflect on these findings in light of Singapore’s curricular innovation efforts over the past decade that reflect its commitment to providing high quality and future-relevant educational experiences, outcomes and social trajectories for its young people. We hope this chapter will provide readers with more intricate understandings of the empirical associations between creative competencies and CPS outcomes, and of Singapore’s students and its national education social system at large.