Search for: All records

In collaborative problem-solving (CPS), students work together to solve problems using their collective knowledge and social interactions to understand the problem and progress towards a solution. This study focuses on how students engage in CPS while working in pairs in a STEM+C (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics, and Computing) environment that involves open-ended computational modeling tasks. Specifically, we study how groups with different prior knowledge in physics and computing concepts differ in their information pooling and consensus-building behaviors. In addition, we examine how these differences impact the development of their shared understanding and learning. Our study consisted of a high school kinematics curriculum with 1D and 2D modeling tasks. Using an exploratory approach, we performed in-depth case studies to analyze the behaviors of groups with different prior knowledge distributions across these tasks. We identify effective information pooling and consensus-building behaviors in addition to difficulties students faced when developing a shared understanding of physics and computing concepts.