Collaborative Problem Solving in Finnish Pre-service Teacher Education: A Case Study
This chapter provides results from a case study utilising the ATC21STM assessment portal in the context of pre-service teacher education in Finland. The results from the portal are combined with a questionnaire regarding teamwork and collaboration dispositions. Twenty-four pre-service teachers completed both these measures. The students of this study were following two divergent teacher education programs that had different profiles in terms of their study contents and methods of studying. The participants of both groups tended to be highly disposed to collaborate and work in teams, and their collaborative problem solving skills can be described as very good. The participants’ measured soci…
Finnish pre-service teachers’ perceptions of their strategic learning skills and collaboration dispositions
To support the development of pupils’ 21st-century skills, teachers themselves must also be competent in these skills and learn them during pre-service teacher education. The aim of this study is to investigate what kind of profiles emerge among Finnish first-year pre-service teachers’ (N = 872) in terms of perceptions of their strategic learning skills and collaboration dispositions and what background variables explain membership of the profiles found. Latent profile analysis showed five student profiles corresponding to perceived strategic learning skills and collaboration dispositions. The most robust factor explaining the membership of the profiles was life satisfaction. Pre-service te…
Student teams’ development over time: tracing the relationship between the quality of communication and teams’ performance
Current discussions in higher education and alumni training acknowledge the challenges training programs face in responding to the authentic needs of the labor market. In addition to academic knowledge, higher education institutions are expected to provide general twenty-first-century skills, such as problem-solving, critical thinking, collaboration, and interpersonal skills. To meet these challenges, many institutions utilize collaborative pedagogies such as learning in teams. However, teamwork in higher education tends to focus primarily on the task aspects of performance at the expense of the team aspects, and for educators, there may be no feasible way to assess whether the students are…
Facilitating socio-cognitive and socio-emotional monitoring in collaborative learning with a regulation macro script – an exploratory study
This study examines student teachers’ collaborative learning by focusing on socio-cognitive and socio-emotional monitoring processes during more and less active script discussions as well as the near transfer of monitoring activities in the subsequent task work. The participants of this study were teacher education students whose collaborative learning was supported with a designed regulation macro script during a six weeks environmental science course. The script divided the group work into three phases, namely: the orientation phase, intermediate phase, and reflection phase. The script was put in use by prompting questions that were delivered to the students on tablets. Question prompts i…
Pre- and In-Service Teachers’ Teamwork Behaviour in Integrated Teacher Training
Teamwork and collaboration skills are regarded as essential proficiencies in the current worlds of work, study and everyday life. A relevant question is whether and how pre-service teachers have opportunities to begin acquiring professional collaboration skills during their studies. In the current study, Finnish pre- and in-service teachers participating in a joint training programme were engaged in reflection tasks to evaluate their teamwork behaviour during a challenging pedagogical design task in mixed teams. The aim of this study was to examine how pre- and in-service teachers perceived their teamwork practices while performing authentic training activities together. The participants re…
Esteettömyys digitaalisissa ympäristöissä kielellisten erityisvaikeuksien näkökulmasta
Digitalisoitumisen myötä monet arjessa tarvittavat tiedot ja palvelut ovat siirtyneet teknologiaympäristöihin, joiden käyttö vaatii digitaalista lukutaitoa. Tutkimuksessa tarkasteltiin digitaalisten ympäristöjen esteettömyyttä sellaisten nuorten näkökulmasta, joilla on kielellisiä erityisvaikeuksia (SLI). Tutkimus pyrki osallistamaan näitä nuoria digitaalisten palvelujen suunnitteluun. Digitaalisiksi palveluiksi valittiin mielen hyvinvointia edistäviä sivustoja, sovelluksia ja pelejä, koska SLI-nuorilla on todettu muita useammin mielen hyvinvoinnin pulmia. Tutkimustehtävänä oli selvittää, miten digitaalisten ympäristöjen esteettömyys ilmenee tutkimukseen osallistuneiden SLI-nuorten puheissa…
“Anything taking shape?” : 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…
Students’ collaboration dispositions across diverse skills of collaborative problem solving in a computer-based assessment environment
Collaborative problem solving (CPS) has been considered as one of the vital 21st century skills. To be successful in CPS requires not only CPS skills but also positive attitudes towards collaboration (i.e., collaboration dispositions). However, the relationship between CPS skills and collaboration dispositions has not been studied much, especially among early adolescent students. The purpose of this study is to investigate the dimensions of students' collaboration dispositions and their relationship to students' assessed CPS skills (i.e., social and cognitive skills of CPS, see Hesse et al., [2015]). Data were collected from 214 Finnish sixth-grade students (Meanage = 12.44, SDage = 0.32, f…
The “Architectures” of Successful Remote Collaborative Problem Solving : Exploring Commitment in Dyadic Interaction
During successful collaborative problem solving (CPS), participants are expected not only to share and process information to solve the task, but also to show responsiveness and commitment to their partners. Accordingly, this exploratory study aims, via two contrasting cases, to acquire a preliminary understanding of how commitments and successful CPS come together in remote, dyadic interaction. To do so, the study relies on objective and subjective measures and combines group with individual levels of analysis on log files and cued interviews. The results revealed how commitments were interrelated with efficient coordination of interactions during CPS. Coordinated, well-communicated proble…
Virtual Reality in Education : Focus on the Role of Emotions and Physiological Reactivity
Cognitive and emotional dimensions are often linked to each other in learning experiences. Moreover, emotions and engagement can lead to better outcomes at the cognitive level. Previous research has indicated that virtual reality (VR) provides a feeling of presence and immersion, which can trigger emotionally engaging learning situations. In this study, we explore the opportunities and challenges related to the use of VR in an educational context. The focus of this article is threefold: First, we explore interdisciplinary research literature related to the use of VR for educational purposes. Second, we introduce our VR pilot study in teacher education, applying three different kinds of VR a…
Pair interactions in online assessments of collaborative problem solving: case-based portraits
This exploratory case study focuses on how pairs of students can build a shared understanding and acquire collaborative problem-solving (CPS) practices during an online assessment of CPS skills, which is seen in the context of the CPS construct, in a symmetrical and asymmetrical task type. Even though CPS is widely recognised as a core twenty-first-century competency, its nature is not yet well understood. Also, until recently, most of studies have focused on the individual’s solution to a problem or on the skills individuals bring into a problem-solving space. This study extends from an individual- to group-level focus in CPS, emphasising the role and quality of the social aspects in CPS p…
Patterns of action transitions in online collaborative problem solving : A network analysis approach
AbstractIn 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 w…
Insights into Finnish first-year pre-service teachers’ twenty-first century skills
This study focuses on Finnish pre-service teachers’ perceptions of their twenty-first century skills, especially their learning strategies, collaboration and teamwork, as well as knowledge and attitudes related to ICT in education. The target group consist of 263 first-year pre-service teachers from three universities. The results outline how pre-service teachers perceive their twenty-first century skills, the relationships between different areas of these skills, and the differences among pre-service teachers in terms of perceived skills. The results indicate that the pre-service teachers perceive themselves as skilled learners in terms of learning strategies used as well as collaboration …
Meaningful Learning in Teacher Education, Characteristics of
From the cognitive perspective, meaningful learning is often understood in terms of the cognitive development and the changes in a learner’s cognitive structure that occurs when the knowledge being learned is relevant to the learner’s existing knowledge and shares significant concepts and aspects with that knowledge. The perspective of the interpreter thus affects the meaning-making process, and the construction of meaning involves the interpretation of new information and experiences by connecting them with prior knowledge. In addition, experiences that challenge former knowledge allow new questions to arise and are thereby potentially meaningful. nonPeerReviewed
Tracing discursive processes of shared knowledge construction in a technology-enhanced higher education setting
This study focused on combining both the group- and individual-level analyses in studying a collaborative activity in technology-enhanced interactions in a higher education setting. The aim was to make visible, with empirical examples, the quality of the students' web-based discussions and trace the route for shared understanding. By quantifying various communicative functions, the analysis provided general knowledge on the quality and purpose of the discussion in the group and highlighted the different functional positions each student had within the group. However, only a detailed interpretative analysis of the relationships between specific thematic contents, communicative functions, and…
Joint attention behaviour in remote collaborative problem solving : exploring different attentional levels in dyadic interaction
AbstractThe current article describes an exploratory study that focussed on joint attention behaviour—the basis of interaction predicting productive collaboration—to better understand collaborative problem solving, particularly its social aspects during remote dyadic interaction. The study considered joint attention behaviour as a socio-linguistic phenomenon and relied on detailed qualitative interaction analysis on event-related measures of multiple observational data (i.e. log files, eye-tracking data). The aim was to illustrate and exemplify how the diverse attentional levels of joint attention behaviour (i.e. monitoring, common, mutual and shared attention) delineated by Siposova and Ca…