Collaborative Problem-solving Environment Research Articles

Common Interests Without Common Expertise: Reflections on Early-career Experiences in Cross-Disciplinary Research.

Cross-disciplinary research enables us to tackle complex problems that require expertise from different fields. Such collaborations involve researchers who have different perspectives, communication styles, and knowledge bases, and can produce results far greater than the sum of their parts. However, in an era of increasing scientific specialization, there exist many barriers for students and early-career researchers (ECRs) interested in training and undertaking interdisciplinary research endeavors. This perspective examines the challenges that students and ECRs perceive and experience in cross-disciplinary work and proposes pathways to create more inclusive and welcoming research environments. This work emerges from a National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded workshop held during the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB) Annual Meeting in January 2023 in Austin, TX. The workshop brought together seasoned interdisciplinary scientists with undergraduate and graduate students to identify and discuss perceived challenges through small group discussions and experience sharing. Through summarizing a range of student concerns about embarking on careers as interdisciplinary scientists and identifying ways to dismantle institutional and lab management-level barriers, we aim to promote an inclusive and collaborative problem-solving environment for scientists of all experience levels.

Escape Rooms as a Collaborative Problem-Solving Environment

Escape room games are a popular recreative activity that recently started gaining popularity as both a means for conducting research studies and a teaching and learning environment. This paper follows a group of 16- to 17-year-old students in an escape room while they encounter logical challenges in order to escape from the room in a limited amount of time. Their ability to work effectively as a team and complete activities quickly is a key element to success. In this setting, the aim was to examine in what ways this innovative environment might help students benefit in terms of social metacognition. The findings gave evidence that during collaborative problem-solving in an escape room, cognitive demands are distributed among the players. This makes metacognition visible, facilitates shared management thus improving individual cognition, facilitates reciprocal scaffolding, and enhances motivation.

Collaborative problem-solving: how to implement and measure it in science teaching and learning

Collaborative problem-solving (CPS) is an essential competency in the 21st century. However, this skill is quite complex due to the two-dimensional domain having to measure at once. This study is a literature review aimed to presents various CPS measurement methods from empirical research for the past 17 years. Hence, teachers can get insight to implement and to develop CPS assessment mainly for training students to solve complex problems. Based on this review, there are two broad methods to measure CPS including using computer environment and real-life context. The former allows measurement to be more accurate and quicker, while the latter enables students to experience face-to-face interaction during problem solving. However, the development of CPS assessment using a computer needs professional ICT and an adequate number of computers as well as a high internet connection. In Indonesia, the implementation of computer-based assessment faces many challenges, and only some schools in the city centre can meet that requirement. Hence, it can be an alternative to measure the interaction of students during the CPS activity by putting high consideration of the using pedagogical content to facilitate CPS environment.

Collaboration between supply chain partners: when does it matter? Evidence from collaborative profiles

PurposeConsidering the limitations of supply chain collaboration (SCC) literature, the purpose of this paper is to develop SCC framework and analyze the SCC practice based on the framework. The framework incorporating internal and external knowledge sharing under a collaborative culture (CC) and problem-solving environment preceded by preparedness is required.Design/methodology/approachTo achieve successful collaboration, this paper encompasses problem-solving and performance measurement, preparedness, culture, relationship strength (RS) and gives resource sharing and planning as internal and external focused perspectives. Exploratory methods are used to analyze the data from industries.FindingsCC, RS and preparedness are crucial that reflect the health of collaboration. Three levels of collaboration practice – good, moderate and weak – are prominent where the extent of SCC practice seems weak. Collaborative activities that matter more are identified. Market-based knowledge sharing is important for good and moderate SCC, while weaker collaboration does not focus on it. Interestingly, this paper finds an increasing level of collaboration may not always result in increased performance. Firms from the pharmaceutical, automobile and electrical/electronic industry tended to practice higher collaboration as compared to other industries.Originality/valueBy integrating market-driven management, resource-based view, and contingency theory, the SCC framework gives a new perspective. Joint planning and resource sharing are categorized as internal and external focused functional areas. The paper identifies three profiles of collaboration and discusses the importance of SCC activities in achieving performance.

DeBola: A Prisoners Dilemma Simulation-Game for NGOs

DeBola is a simulation-game constructed as a teaching-tool for the topics of conflict analysis and resolution, collaborative problem solving, negotiation and decision-making. Specifically, it does so in the context of NGOs and mission-driven organizations. DeBola involves four NGOs working on health missions in Africa. The four have been diverted to combat an outbreak of Ebola. The NGOs are tasked to administer a new, effective, Ebola vaccine called DeBola, in an attempt to turn back the tide of Ebola’s spread. However, there are operational constraints, and over multiple iterations, the NGOs mast make decisions with regards to their operative path. In the framework of a Prisoners Dilemma structure, the four NGOs must decide whether to collaborate or compete with one another, in a situation rife with uncertainty. Their decisions are made in individual and collaborative problem-solving environments. Collaboration might lead to greater joint success in conducting vaccination operations. However, given that each NGO’s funding is contingent on its own success in administering vaccines, each NGO is also pulled towards working alone. The outcome of their decisions affect them all, determining their organizational longevity and the degree to which they will achieve their mission. Often, these two factors conflict with each other – reflecting a real-life tension faced by aid organizations, non-profits, government agencies and other mission-driven organizations. DeBola: Illustrates, experientially, the complexity of generating cooperation in situations intuitively grasped, or objectively seen, as competitive; Introduces the challenges of decision-making, collaboration, and organizational survival in the specific context of NGOs and mission-driven, non-profit organizations; Enhances participants’ ability to identify key obstacles and pathways to forming collaboration, including trust, communication and relationship building. The document contains all role information necessary to conduct the simulation, as well as a comprehensive teacher’s guide.

Constructivism: Paradigm Shift from Teacher Centered To Student Centered Approach

Constructivism is a departure in thought about the nature of knowing, hence of learning and thus of teaching. Constructivists believe that knowledge and truth are constructed by people and therefore do not exist outside the human mind. Von Glaserfeld (1984) has written: “…learners construct understanding. They do not simply mirror and reflect what they are told or what they read. Learners look for meaning and will try to find regularity and order in the events of the world even in the absence of full or complete information.” Constructivism requires a teacher to act as a facilitator whose main function is to help students become active participants in their learning and make meaningful connections between prior knowledge, new knowledge, and the processes involved in learning. Teachers, thus, need to have a sound understanding of what constructivism means to evaluate its promise and to use it knowledgeably and effectively. Hence, from a constructivist perspective, the primary responsibility of the teacher is to create and maintain a collaborative problem-solving environment, where students are allowed to construct their own knowledge, and the teacher acts as a facilitator and guide. In the constructivist model, students are urged to be actively involved in their own process of learning, on the assumption that individuals construct knowledge instead of receiving it from others. The way in which knowledge is conceived and acquired, the types of knowledge, skills, and activities emphasized, the role of the learner and the teacher, how goals are established: All of these factors are expressed differently from the constructivist perspective (Christie & Stone, 1999). This paper explicates some of the theoretical background of Constructivism and then presents.

The Development of a Self-regulation in a Collaborative Context Scale

Self-regulation has been shown as a critical factor in learning in a regular classroom environment (e.g. Wolters and Pintrich in Instr Sci 26(1):27–47, 1998. doi: 10.1023/A:1003035929216 ). However, little research has been conducted to understand self-regulation in the context of collaboration (Dinsmore et al. in Educ Psychol Rev 20(4):391–409, 2008. doi: 10.1007/s10648-008-9083-6 ). Recently, researchers have been exploring how learners regulate themselves in collaborative problem-solving environments using qualitative methods (e.g. Chan in Metacogn Learn 7(1):63–73, 2012. doi: 10.1007/s11409-012-9086-z ; Lajoie and Lu in Metacogn Learn, 2011. doi: 10.1007/s11409-011-9077-5 ). However, there is a lack of instruments to measure self-regulation in a collaborative context (SRCC). Therefore, the current study was intended to propose a new instrument to measure SRCC. One hundred and thirty-one college students from a Midwestern university completed a survey for SRCC after participating in a collaborative problem-solving task. The exploratory factor analysis yielded four factors: clarification and resolution, elaboration, refuting, and summarization. Three of the four factors were moderately correlated. The results contribute to our understanding of self-regulation in a collaborative context, which allows researchers to study this phenomenon quantitatively.

Restructuring to Promote Collaboration and Exceed User Needs: The Blackwell Library Access Services Experience

Through vision, leadership, and creativity, Salisbury University's Blackwell Library transformed its access services department structurally and philosophically to better position itself to meet, and strive to exceed, today's user needs and expectations. Restructuring and the introduction of new leadership and new ideas provided the foundation for creating a more open and collaborative problem-solving environment. New services and models were introduced based on various user feedback channels and staff initiatives, producing a department better equipped to not only manage, but to proactively engage with the one constant of change that is universal among today's academic libraries.

Leadership training to improve nurse retention

This paper discusses findings from an evaluation of a training programme designed to promote collaborative, team-based approaches to improve nurse retention within health care organizations. A year-long leadership training programme was designed and implemented to develop effective teams that could address retention challenges in a diverse set of organizations in Colorado ranging from public, private to non-profit. An evaluation, based on a combination of participant observation, group interviews, and the use of standardized tests measuring individual emotional intelligence and team dynamics was conducted to assess the effectiveness of the training programme. What role do the emotional intelligence of individual members and organizational culture play in team effectiveness? Out of five teams participating in the training programme, two performed exceptionally well, one experienced moderate success and two encountered significant problems. Team dynamics were significantly affected by the emotional intelligence of key members holding supervisory positions and by the existing culture and structure of the participating organizations. Team approaches to retention hold promise but require careful development and are most likely to work where organizations have a collaborative problem-solving environment.

Promoting Multi-Layered Peer Learning in a Course on Engineering Grand Challenges

Peer learning underpins the effectiveness of many engaging pedagogies. This study combined peer learning within teams and learning from more capable peers to form a multi-layered peer learning model. The effectiveness of using this approach in a course on engineering grand challenges was evaluated through pre- and post-tests on students’ perception of their abilities, assessment rubrics, and focus groups. Results demonstrated that in a collaborative problem-solving environment, students learned from interacting with each other, and from being challenged with alternative perspectives by peer tutors. Peer tutors learned through reflecting on their own experience.

Environ: integrating VR and CAD in engineering projects.

Environ plays an important part in a collaborative problem-solving environment tailored to assist the control and execution of large, complex petroleum engineering projects. To aid collaboration, Environ provides a scripting layer for executing commands (locally and remotely) and resources such as annotation of engineering artifacts and synchronized navigation control. Although Environ's performance is satisfactory for numerous CAD models, its performance deserves more attention, especially because we designed it to run on desktop computers and to visualize CAD models of increasing complexity. As we mentioned before, no commercial or academic solution has completely solved the problems of CAD-VR integration. This fact restricts, but hasn't stopped, the industry's increasing use of VR systems. Meanwhile, our research related to Environ, as well as other researchers' work, is providing valuable contributions to the search for effective solutions.

Data management and analysis for the Earth System Grid

The international climate community is expected to generate hundreds of petabytes of simulation data within the next five to seven years. This data must be accessed and analyzed by thousands of analysts worldwide in order to provide accurate and timely estimates of the likely impact of climate change on physical, biological, and human systems. Climate change is thus not only a scientific challenge of the first order but also a major technological challenge. In order to address this technological challenge, the Earth System Grid Center for Enabling Technologies (ESG-CET) has been established within the U.S. Department of Energy's Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC)-2 program, with support from the offices of Advanced Scientific Computing Research and Biological and Environmental Research. ESG-CET's mission is to provide climate researchers worldwide with access to the data, information, models, analysis tools, and computational capabilities required to make sense of enormous climate simulation datasets. Its specific goals are to (1) make data more useful to climate researchers by developing Grid technology that enhances data usability; (2) meet specific distributed database, data access, and data movement needs of national and international climate projects; (3) provide a universal and secure web-based data access portal for broad multi-model data collections; and (4) provide a wide-range of Grid-enabled climate data analysis tools and diagnostic methods to international climate centers and U.S. government agencies. Building on the successes of the previous Earth System Grid (ESG) project, which has enabled thousands of researchers to access tens of terabytes of data from a small number of ESG sites, ESG-CET is working to integrate a far larger number of distributed data providers, high-bandwidth wide-area networks, and remote computers in a highly collaborative problem-solving environment.

Treisman workshops and student performance in CS

Active learning techniques, including collaborative programming and problem solving environments, have been widely adopted by many computer science educators. A related approach is the Treisman model, which was originally designed for the first-year calculus course and involves intensive workshops where students collaborate in small groups to solve problems. We have adapted the model for both the data structures and algorithms courses at our institution. Regression analysis indicates that students who participate in the workshops for the algorithms course perform better (0.561 grade points on a 4-point scale) than those who do not, even after accounting for prior academic performance. However, the workshops appear to have less of an effect on student grades in the data structures course. This study provides evidence that the workshop model can be an effective learning environment for students in courses primarily involving analysis, but that for courses that involve large amounts of programming, further adaptations to the model might be needed.

Conjectured ideas as mediating artifacts for the appropriation of mathematical meanings

In recent times, we have witnessed a much greater emphasis on learning through the social construction of mathematical meanings. This article describes how students can be engaged in the appropriation of mathematical meanings through playing with ideas within the social constructive context. A central premise of this article is that conjectured ideas act as mediational artifacts between the social and individual levels of cognition. By playing with ideas, we describe the process as conjecturing, negotiating, and situating of mathematical meanings. In particular, this article will illustrate “turn sequences” of mathematical ideas transacted between two students, “D” (age 13) and “M” (age 14) within a computer-mediated collaborative problem-solving environment. Through the semiotic process of writing mathematics to each other (in the form of turn sequences), students appropriate mathematical meanings from one another. The idea-conjectures become artifacts where students negotiate and situate in order to solve the mathematics problem. The theoretical underpinnings of this article include situated cognition, activity theory, and the concept of appropriation.