Collaborative Problem-solving Task Research Articles

Online collaborative problem-solving as a tangible outcome of digital skills in technical and vocational higher education

In today's world, specific skills are essential for success in work and life. Educators, governments, and industry leaders recognize collaborative problem-solving (CPS) and digital skills as necessary for the 21st century. However, our current understanding of these skills' interconnection and development within technical and vocational higher education remains limited. This study aims to achieve two main objectives. First, we want to examine the level of digital skills among technical and vocational higher education students in Chile and how it relates to their socioeconomic background. Second, we aim to investigate how students' different levels of digital skills influence their satisfaction with online collaboration and their assessment of group processes after completing an online CPS task. The study identified three distinct groups of students based on their digital skills: high-skilled, medium-skilled, and low-skilled. The low-skilled group faced more socioeconomic disadvantages compared to the other two groups. Moreover, students with low digital skills reported lower satisfaction with online group work and a poorer self-evaluation of the group processes involved in the collaborative online task. Insights for technical and vocational higher education institutions to foster targeted support of digital skills development for their student body are discussed.

Exploring Family Obligation as a Buffer Between Parental Differential Treatment and Sibling Hostility

AbstractHigh levels of between-sibling parental differential treatment (PDT) have been associated with several negative outomes, including externalizing behavior, emotional maladjustment, and depressive symptoms, as well as with hostility in sibling relationships. In contrast, high levels of family obligation have been associated with positive adolescent adjustment and family dynamics. Given the substantial risks associated with PDT and the benefits of family obligation for emotional health and family relations, we investigated family obligation as a potential buffer against the negative effects of PDT on sibling relationships. We hypothesized that 1) younger and older siblings experiencing higher levels of PDT would demonstrate greater sibling hostility, and 2) family obligation would buffer against these associations. Adolescent younger siblings (Mage = 12.1; 24 females) and their adolescent older siblings (Mage = 14.5; 21 females) participated in a collaborative problem-solving task, which was coded for directional expressions of hostility. Siblings also independently completed questionnaires on PDT and family obligation. Greater PDT was associated with more hostility expressed from younger sibling to older sibling, and a greater sense of family obligation buffered against this association. Greater PDT was also associated with increased hostility from older sibling to younger sibling, but no significant interaction effect was found with family obligation. Findings highlight the potential of family obligation to improve sibling relationships in the context of PDT and can inform future sibling research and family intervention work; the import of these findings is limited due to the homogeneous nature of the sample and we recommend inclusion of more diverse populations.

Multi-Level Linguistic Alignment in a Dynamic Collaborative Problem-Solving Task.

Cocreating meaning in collaboration is challenging. Success is often determined by people's abilities to coordinate their language to converge upon shared mental representations. Here we explore one set of low-level linguistic behaviors, linguistic alignment, that both emerges from, and facilitates, outcomes of high-level convergence. Linguistic alignment captures the ways people reuse, that is, "align to," the lexical, syntactic, and semantic forms of others' utterances. Our focus is on the temporal change of multi-level linguistic alignment, as well as how alignment is related to communicative outcomes within a unique collaborative problem-solving paradigm. The primary task, situated within a virtual educational video game, requires creative thinking between three people where the paths for possible solutions are highly variable. We find that over time interactions are marked by decreasing lexical and syntactic alignment, with a trade-off of increasing semantic alignment. However, greater semantic alignment does not translate into better team performance. Overall, these findings provide greater clarity on the role of linguistic coordination within complex and dynamic collaborative problem-solvingtasks.

Functional graph contrastive learning of hyperscanning EEG reveals emotional contagion evoked by stereotype-based stressors

IntroductionThis study delves into the intricacies of emotional contagion and its impact on performance within dyadic interactions. Specifically, it focuses on the context of stereotype-based stress (SBS) during collaborative problem-solving tasks among female pairs. Through an exploration of emotional contagion, this study seeks to unveil its underlying mechanisms and effects.MethodsLeveraging EEG-based hyperscanning technology, we introduced an innovative approach known as the functional graph contrastive learning (fGCL), which extracts subject-invariant representations of neural activity patterns from feedback trials. These representations are further subjected to analysis using the dynamic graph classification (DGC) model, aimed at dissecting the process of emotional contagion along three independent temporal stages.ResultsThe results underscore the substantial role of emotional contagion in shaping the trajectories of participants' performance during collaborative tasks in the presence of SBS conditions.DiscussionOverall, our research contributes invaluable insights into the neural underpinnings of emotional contagion, thereby enriching our comprehension of the complexities underlying social interactions and emotional dynamics.

How multiple levels of metacognitive awareness operate in collaborative problem solving

Metacognitive awareness is knowing about learners’ own thinking and learning, facilitated by introspection and self-evaluation. Although metacognitive functions are personal, they cannot be explained simply by individual conceptions, especially in a collaborative group learning context. This study considers metacognitive awareness on multiple levels. It investigates how metacognitive awareness at the individual, social, and environmental levels are associated with collaborative problem solving (CPS). Seventy-seven higher education students collaborated in triads on a computer-based simulation about running a fictional company for 12 simulated months. The individual level of metacognitive awareness was measured using the Metacognitive Awareness Inventory. The social level of metacognitive awareness was measured multiple times during CPS through situated self-reports, that is, metacognitive judgements and task difficulty. The environmental level of metacognitive awareness was measured via a complex CPS process so that group members’ interactions were video recorded and facial expression data were created by post-processing video-recorded data. Perceived individual and group performance were measured with self-reports at the end of the CPS task. In the analysis, structural equation modelling was conducted to observe the relationships between multiple levels of metacognitive awareness and CPS task performance. Three-level multilevel modelling was also used to understand the effect of environmental-level metacognitive awareness. The results reveal that facial expression recognition makes metacognitive awareness visible in a collaborative context. This study contributes to research on metacognition by displaying both the relatively static and dynamic aspects of metacognitive awareness in CPS.

Intention of learners to continue online learning using the extended TAM framework

This study examined the characteristics that impact students' intentions to use Microsoft Teams as their primary teaching and learning platform. A total of 171 students were randomly selected to complete an electronic questionnaire that tested the constructs of the extended Technology Acceptance Model (TAM). The results indicated that “perceived usefulness” and “attitude” towards the platform together with “perceived ease of use” (R2 = 73.9%) were the most important predictors of students' intention to use Microsoft Teams in the future (R2 = 77.8% and 73.9% respectively). This study recommends lecturers and students communicate more to increase the student’s intrinsic motivation in online learning by incorporating various activities that promote collaboration, communication and active learning in the online environment. Such activities can be facilitated by the platform and can include online discussions, peer review, group projects and collaborative problem-solving tasks. In addition, the study suggests that lecturers should provide more training and support to students on how to use MS Teams effectively to enhance their learning experience.

Investigating collaborative problem solving skills and outcomes across computer-based tasks

Collaborative problem solving (CPS) is a critical competency for the modern workforce, as many of todays' problems require groups to come together to find innovative solutions to complex problems. This has motivated increased interest in work dedicated to assessing and developing CPS skills. However, there has been limited attention in prior CPS assessment research on potential differences in how CPS behaviors are exhibited across task contexts. In the current study, we investigated associations among middle- and high-school students’ displayed CPS skills across two online (i.e., via videoconferencing) tasks (Physics Playground and the T-Shirt Math Task) and the extent to which different skills were related to CPS outcomes across those tasks. Results showed variation in associations of CPS skills across the tasks, contributing further evidence to our understanding of how different CPS task designs can give students the opportunity to demonstrate different CPS skills. Our findings highlight the potential of incorporating multiple tasks during CPS assessments and can inform future research on CPS task design and computer-based CPS assessment.

Assessing Korean writing ability through a scenario-based assessment approach

Advocating for measuring a broadened construct of writing ability, scenario-based assessment (SBA) has recently been used to assess writing ability. While SBA for writing has been explored in ESL contexts (e.g., Banerjee, 2019; Purpura, 2021), it has been rarely used or examined in the context of languages other than English, especially those that are typologically distant from English, such as Korean. This study explores the feasibility of designing a scenario-based Korean writing assessment (K-SBA). A pilot study was conducted with 51 participants from a Korean as a foreign language program at a US university. Through a goal-oriented scenario of a study abroad program in South Korea, examinees were presented with a collaborative problem-solving task where they were expected to learn about two potential class trip destinations and write a summary of the pros and cons of each destination based on what they learned. The results indicated that the K-SBA was psychometrically sound, providing adequate evidence of reliability. It elicited construct-relevant performances reflecting features unique to the Korean language, such as sociolinguistic competence through the use of honorifics or rhetorical control through a range of cohesive devices. Additionally, variations in examinee performances were observed across the different course levels.

The impact of rubrics and scripts on self-regulation, self-efficacy and performance in collaborative problem-solving tasks

Rubrics and scripts are tools that can promote self-assessment. Although similar, rubrics and scripts differ in the metacognitive processes they support, their cognitive demands, how students use them and their focus. While there is ample evidence of the positive effects of rubrics, there is less research on the impact of scripts and their use in collaborative tasks. We aimed to compare the effects of rubrics and scripts on self-regulation, self-efficacy, academic performance and students’ perceptions when used in group tasks on econometrics. A total of 134 university students participated in a quasi-experiment under three conditions (rubrics, scripts, control). Positive effects on self-regulation were found for the experimental groups, and a positive impact on self-efficacy only for the rubric group. Additionally, as previous academic performance differed among conditions, difference-in-differences analysis was employed. In the rubric condition, the students that started from very high levels of academic achievement benefited more from using the rubric. In contrast, in the script condition, it was the students with intermediate or high levels of academic performance who experienced the greatest benefits from employing the script.

협력적 문제해결 과제의 지시문 유형에 따른 팀 활동 내 언어적 상호작용, 성취도 및 만족도 분석

Objectives The purpose of this study is to compare the effects of worksheet question prompts (facilitating conceptual knowledge vs. facilitating procedural knowledge) in collaborative problem-solving tasks on team’s verbal interaction, academic achievement, and class satisfaction.
 Methods 53 female undergraduates from universities in the metro area participated in the experiment. For data analysis, opinion mining based on KOSAC and keyword analysis were applied on the transcripts of team activities and group interviews. Criteria for analyzing verbal interactions were divided into polarity (positive, negative, neutral, complex) and types (agreement, argument, judgment, intention, emotion, speculation, and others). In addition, t-test was conducted to compare the mean differences in verbal interaction and academic achievement by group.
 Results Regarding the verbal interaction, the frequency of using positive expressions was significantly higher in the experimental group using the worksheet for facilitating procedural knowledge(p<.05). However, in terms of academic achievement, the mean difference between groups was not significant for both the pre- and post-scores(p>.05). As the result of keyword analysis on class satisfaction, the top keywords in the experimental group were ‘problem’, ‘lecture’, ‘data’, ‘understanding’, and ‘realistic’, whereas the top keywords in the control group were ‘lecture’, ‘content’, ‘task’, ‘problem’, and ‘application’.
 Conclusions These findings imply the necessity for ongoing attention to the study of behavioral data generated during the learning process as well as the development of various worksheets to facilitate active interaction among learners.

Understanding college students’ cognitive engagement in online collaborative problem-solving: A multimodal data analysis

Laboratory experience is critical to foster college students’ collaborative problem-solving (CPS) abilities, but whether students stay cognitively engaged in CPS tasks during online laboratory sessions remains unknown. This study applied multimodal data analysis to examine college students’ (N = 36) cognitive engagement in CPS during their online experimentation experience. Groups of three collaborated on CPS tasks via shared worksheets and computer-based simulations on videoconferences. Portable electroencephalogram instruments were used to determine students’ levels of cognitive engagement in CPS activities. The multimodal data analysis (e.g., electroencephalogram, surveys, and artifacts) results showed a significant difference in students’ cognitive engagement between different phases of CPS. The students’ cognitive engagement significantly differed between groups who did and did not complete the task. Additionally, intrinsic motivation predicted students’ cognitive engagement in the completion groups while self-efficacy was the primary predictor of cognitive engagement for the groups who did not complete the task.

Do you know your partner's personality through virtual collaboration or negotiation? Investigating perceptions of personality and their impacts on performance

Interpersonal skills, including collaborative problem solving (CPS) and negotiation skills, are essential in many aspects of the 21st century. With the rapid development of technologies in the past decades, it has become increasingly prevalent for collaborations, negotiations, and communications to occur virtually. Furthermore, the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the shift from in-person interactions to virtual interactions. On the other hand, personality traits, enduring characteristics of individuals that are largely stable over time, affect a wide variety of human behaviors, including how people interact with each other. In this study, we investigated the extent to which team members' personalities, the heterogeneity in personalities among team members, and the interaction processes in virtual tasks impacted performance on these tasks with limited exposure to personal information such as appearance and voice. In addition, we examined how one perceived the team partner's personality and how people tended to project their own personality onto partners during the short-term virtual interactions. Findings suggested that higher heterogeneity in personality between partners was associated with better team negotiation performance, while it was not associated with collaboration outcomes in the CPS task. Implications of the findings and limitations of this research were also discussed.

Adaptation and validation of two annotation scales for assessing social skills in a corpus of multimodal collaborative interactions.

Behavioral observation scales are important for understanding and assessing social skills. In the context of collaborative problem-solving (CPS) skills, considered essential in the 21st century, there are no validated scales in French that can be adapted to different CPS tasks. The aim of this study is to adapt and validate, by annotating a new video corpus of dyadic interactions that we have collected, two observational scales allowing us to qualitatively assess CPS skills: the Social Performance Rating Scale (SPRS) and the Social Skills of Collaboration Scale (SSC). The construct validity of these two scales was assessed by exploratory factor analysis and inter-item correlations. We also checked inter-judge agreement using inter-class correlation coefficients. Internal consistency was determined using Cronbach's alpha and convergent and divergent validity by assessing correlations between the two scales and measures of depression and alexithymia. Finally, the discriminative properties of the two scales were analyzed by comparing the scores obtained by a group of anxious individuals and a non-anxious control group. The results show that our two scales have excellent inter-item correlations. Internal consistency is excellent (alpha SPRS =0.90; SSC = 0.93). Inter-rater agreement ranged from moderate to high. Finally, convergent validity was significant with the alexithymia scale, as was divergent validity with the depression scale. Anxious individuals had lower scores on both scales than non-anxious individuals. Both scales show good psychometric properties for assessing social skills relevant to different collaborative tasks. They also identify individuals with difficulties in social interaction. Thus, they could allow monitoring the effectiveness of training social skills useful in CPS.

La teoría del conflicto sociocognitivo del desarrollo: Una mirada retrospectiva a partir de investigaciones propias

The theory of socio-cognitive conflict emerges in European Psychology in the 1970s, particularly from the research of the social psychology school of Geneve, that had a strong diffusion in the following years. This theory represents a neo-piagetian critical view of Piaget’s theory of cognitive development, in the sense that the attention is focused on the role of peer socio-cognitive interaction (specifically in the social confrontations of different points of view) enhancing cognitive growth. The value of the socio-cognitive conflict promoting cognitive development lies in the decentration effect that it produces. According to this view, disturbance resulting from socio-cognitive conflicts gives way to a superior state of equilibrium. The first part of the article focuses on the theoretical and methodological analysis of the concept. In that way, two periods are distinguished in the evolution of the paradigm attending the inclusion of the communicational analysis of the verbal exchange between subjects. Also, this analysis refers to many confusions and misunderstandings in the larger application of the paradigm to psychology and education. The aim of the second part is to present some experimental illustrations produced by the IRICE (CONICET) research team’s work. These illustrations concern three conceptual axes: the application of the paradigm to the development of the formal-logical intelligence, the microanalysis of modalities and types of socio-cognitive conflict, and the extended application of the paradigm to the knowledge learning and conceptual change. The research reported in the first axis concerns the comparison of two experimental conditions: collaborative (dyads) and individual problem solving task (problems of Raven’s test), in a sample of 12-13 year old students. The comparison concerns to the performances both in the experimental treatment and in the individual post-test of equivalent problems applied to all participants. Results show, in both cases, the superiority of the collective condition. The second axis focuses on some studies concerning the modalities and types of socio-cognitive conflicts. Particularly, a system of categories for the analysis of the social behavior of children of different ages (4, 8 and 12 years old) in a block construction task (to build a house) is reported. This system differentiates many kinds of interactional behavior: dissociation, dominance-submission (both lower social coordination), cooperation (implicit and explicit) and collaboration (these three are modalities of higher social coordination). The third axis examines some illustrations referring to the extension of paradigm to the epistemic learning. After some references to the difficulty of this extension to the educational settings, two studies are reported. The first one concerns an experimental comparison between a collaborative learning condition (dyads) and an individual learning condition in university students of Psychology and Physics. Also, two kinds of collaborative learning are considered, one that assures alternating of participation, the incentive of argumentation and the reciprocal evaluation (in other words, the promotion of the socio-cognitive conflict), and one that is carried out without any intervention (spontaneous collaborative learning). Results show the superiority of the promoting socio-cognitive conflict condition upon the others, both in a written production and in individual learning post-tests. In a second research the comparison is between three instructional modalities to teach an epistemic topic: expositive, participative (with teacher’s scaffolding) and collaborative (only peers), in students of the first grade of secondary education (13 years old), in samples taken from two schools. Results for individual learning show that there are not great differences between the three modalities when the initial level (pre-test) of cognitive competence is high, but not if the cognitive level is low; here the collaborative condition (without scaffolding) has many difficulties. Finally, the article presents some general conclusions specifically concerning the socio-cognitive conflict. https://doi.org/10.16888/interd.2022.39.3.16

Young children rely on gossip when jointly reasoning about whom to believe.

People rely on reputational information communicated via gossip when deciding about with whom to cooperate, whom to believe, and whom to trust. In two studies, we investigated whether 5- and 7-year-old children trust in gossip when determining a course of action. In Study 1, 5- and 7-year-old German-speaking peer dyads (N = 64 dyads, 32 female dyads) were presented with a collaborative problem-solving task (e.g., deciding together what a creature eats). Each child individually received conflicting information about the solution from a different informant (e.g., one proposed rocks; the other proposed sand). Each child additionally heard gossip about the informant's reputation: one informant had a good reputation; the other had a bad reputation. In the experimental condition, the reputation was relevant to the task (honesty), whereas it was irrelevant in the control condition (tidiness). Seven-year-old dyads, and 5-year-old dyads to a lesser extent, settled on the items suggested by the informant with good reputation in the experimental but not in the control condition. Only 7-year-old children explicitly referred to the information conveyed via gossip, engaging in metatalk about the reputations of the informants. In Study 2, we replicated these findings in a more controlled experiment in which 5- and 7-year-old American English-speaking children (N = 48, 27 girls) tried to convince an adult partner who proposed the item suggested by the informant with bad reputation. Thus, starting around age 5, and more reliably at age 7, children selectively rely on gossip in identifying trustworthy individuals in their collaborative reasoning with partners. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Patterns of action transitions in online collaborative problem solving: A network analysis approach

In today’s digital society, computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) and collaborative problem solving (CPS) have received increasing attention. CPS studies have often emphasized outcomes such as skill levels of CPS, whereas the action transitions in the paths to solve the problems related to these outcomes have been scarcely studied. The patterns within action transitions are able to capture the mutual influence of actions conducted by pairs and demonstrate the productivity of students’ CPS. The purpose of the study presented in this paper is to examine Finnish sixth graders’ (N = 166) patterns of action transitions during CPS in a computer-based assessment environment in which the students worked in pairs. We also investigated the relation between patterns of action transitions and students’ social and cognitive skill levels related to CPS. The actions in the sequential processes of computer-based CPS tasks included using a mouse to drag objects and typing texts in chat windows. Applying social network analysis to the log file data generated from the assessment environment, we created transition networks using weighted directed networks (nodes for those actions conducted by paired students and directed links for the transitions between two actions when the first action is followed by the second action in sequence). To represent various patterns of action transitions in each transition network, we calculated the numbers of nodes (numbers of actions conducted), density (average frequency of transitions among actions), degree centralization (the dispersion of attempts given to different actions), reciprocity (the extent to which pairs revisit the previous one action immediately), and numbers of triadic patterns (numbers of different repeating formats within three actions). The results showed that pairs having at least one member with high social and high cognitive CPS skills conducted more actions and demonstrated a higher average frequency of action transitions with a higher tendency to conduct actions for different number of times, implying that they attempted more paths to solve the problem than the other pairs. This could be interpreted as the pairs having at least one student with high social and high cognitive CPS skills exhibiting more productive CPS than the other pairs. However, we did not find a significant difference across the pairs in terms of alternating sequences of two or three actions. Investigating the patterns of action transitions of the dyads in this study deepens our understanding of the mutual influence between the CPS actions occurring within dyads. Regarding pedagogical implication, our results offer empirical evidence recommending greater awareness of the students’ social and cognitive capacities in CPS when assigning them into pairs for computer-based CPS tasks. Further, this study contributes to the methodological development of process-oriented research in CSCL by integrating an analysis of action transition patterns with a skill-based assessment of CPS.

Cultural or economic factors? Which matters more for collaborative problem-solving skills: Evidence from 31 countries

Much of today's complex work is performed by teams of people with various backgrounds and expertise. Collaborative problem-solving (CPS) skills are being increasingly emphasized in the workplace, government, and academia. In the present study, we examined whether socioenvironmental factors could predict adolescents' CPS skills and whether such an effect was unique to CPS skills compared with mathematics, reading, and science for the first time by using data from approximately 209,088 high school students from 31 countries. We found that both cultural factors (i.e., individualism versus collectivism) and economic factors (i.e., economic inequality) could explain how students performed in CPS tasks but that economic inequality was more powerful in explaining CPS skills. Gender differences were reflected only in the influence of economic factors on CPS skills. Additionally, there were similarities and differences between the effects of socioenvironmental factors on CPS skills and the other three core subjects (i.e., mathematics, science, and reading). Our results suggest that to enhance students' CPS skills, researchers and educators should pay more attention to the impact of wealth distribution inequality on CPS skills.

How good are the students practicing the Collaborative Problem-Solving Skillsin Mathematics-Based Task? (A Case of Indonesia)

This study aims to assess the collaborative problem-solving skills of junior high school students on the subject of mathematics using the teaching approach of collaborative problem-solving. The student’s skill in collaborative-problem solving will be the main focus of this study due to this skillis one of the important required skill regarding the Indonesian 2013 curriculum demands. In addition, collaboration-problem solving skill is a mandatory skill that must be given to students in facing global competition. Collaborative problem-solving skills are one of the 21st century skills that not only prioritize knowledge of cognition but must also be together with social attitudes that will make success in a work group. This research was conducted at SMP Negeri 2 Telaga, State Junior High School in Gorontalo Province, Indonesia and was carried out in the academic year 2020/2021.The research method used was a survey with a quantitative approach. The instruments used in data collection were tests. The results showed that the student’s skills were still relatively moderate in using collaborative problem-solving skills, namely building and managing mutual understanding with the value of 11,682, taking action approaches or strategies to solve problems(10,219), and building and managing team organizations with 12,854.

Collaborative programming problem-solving in augmented reality: Multimodal analysis of effectiveness and group collaboration

Although numerous studies have demonstrated different ways that augmented reality (AR) can assist students to understand the learning content via contextualised visualisation, less explored is its effect on collaborative problem-solving (CPS) in computer programming. This study aims to investigate how AR affects a CPS in a programming task. We designed a mobile app that could visualise computer programming in AR and non-AR 3D images. The app could involve two participants working together on a programming problem face to face in the same workspace. We conducted a within-subjects experiment to compare their AR experience to the non-AR experience and collected multimodal usage data about the task performance, verbal communication, and user experience. The analysis showed that the participants in the AR experience had higher task performance and more insightful communication than the non-AR. The participants also had positive attitudes toward the use of AR in classroom instructions. In a semi-structured interview, the participants reflected that AR helped them engage in the content and analyse the task easier. Based on this study, we discuss several challenges and implications for future instruction designers. Implications for practice or policy: AR can improve student engagement in a collaborative problem-solving task. AR has the potential to promote and improve group communication in collaborative work. Instruction designers may need to carefully align the characteristics of AR with the task content especially when physical models are rarely used in the learning content.

\u201cAnything taking shape?\u201d Capturing various layers of small group collaborative problem solving in an experiential geometry course in initial teacher education

Collaborative problem solving (CPS) is widely recognized as a prominent 21st-century skill to be mastered. Until recently, research on CPS has often focused on problem solution by the individual; the interest in investigating how the theorized problem-solving constructs function as broader social units, such as pairs or small groups, is relatively recent. Capturing the complexity of CPS processes in group-level interaction is challenging. Therefore, a method of analysis capturing various layers of CPS was developed that aimed for a deeper understanding of CPS as a small-group enactment. In the study, small groups of teacher education students worked on two variations of open-ended CPS tasks—a technology-enhanced task and a task using physical objects. The method, relying on video data, encompassed triangulation of analysis methods and combined the following: (a) directed content analysis of the actualized CPS in groups, (b) process analysis and visualizations, and (c) qualitative cases. Content analysis did not show a large variation in how CPS was actualized in the groups or tasks for either case, whereas process analysis revealed both group- and task-related differences in accordance with the interchange of CPS elements. The qualitative cases exemplified the interaction diversity in the quality of coordination and students’ equal participation in groups. It was concluded that combining different methods gives access to various layers of CPS; moreover, it can contribute to a deeper articulation of the CPS as a group-level construct, providing divergent ways to understand CPS in this context.