Transactivity and Knowledge Co-Construction in Collaborative Problem Solving

Successfully engaging in collaborative problem solving is an essential constituent of professional and general life skills.Collaborative problem solving is also used to engage learners in collaborative processes relevant to the acquisition of knowledge and skills.Here, learners co-construct knowledge by transactively building on each other's contributions.In this symposium, we explore the factors leading to successful engagement in collaborative problem solving.The conceptualization of transactivity in collaborative problem solving is refined balancing the merits of both sharing new knowledge and referring to others' contributions.Empirical studies in this symposium show that it is important for successful collaborative problem solving that individuals elicit and share information with their learning partners who should evenly participate.Further, engaging in relevant collaborative processes can be facilitated by scaffolds such as sentence openers facilitating learners referring to each other. Symposium introductionCollaborative problem solving is meant to engage learners in joint discourse and knowledge co-construction.CSCL research particularly inquires under which circumstances collaborative problem solving facilitates individual and joint learning (Roschelle & Teasley, 1995).Here, the most promising collaborative learning integrates both solving socio-cognitive conflicts and mutual support towards deeper understanding.Collaboratively exchanging and scrutinizing each other's ideas, arguments, and reasoning towards the problem solution is key to the co-construction of knowledge.Transactivity (i.e., learners building on each other's reasoning) has been identified as a relevant quality predicting collaborative learning outcomes.Yet, the rather general conceptualization of transactivity allows a range of different operationalizations, partly leading to inconsistent results.Further aspects in collaborative problem solving need to be considered interacting with CSCL 2023 Proceedings © ISLS 338 transactive discourse and how transactivity facilitates learning.These aspects concern how activities and engagement are distributed in the group's discourse.Another aspect is how learners share information during collaborative problem solving.This highly depends on knowledge and information accessible to the learners such as prior knowledge or other resources.The emergence of these aspects in collaborative problem solving and their relevance for knowledge co-construction is being investigated in the papers collected in this symposium.In the first paper, Vogel & Weinberger conceptualize transactivity as relevant mechanism for successful collaborative problem solving.It extends the commonly used definition by balancing the relevance of both adding novel information and building on other's contribution in collaborative discourse.The empirical studies in this symposium shed light on the above-mentioned aspects of successful collaborative problem solving and how they may be related to transactivity.The study by Hong et al. explores collaboration patterns in problem-based learning, revealing that the individual contributions in collaborative discourse are distributed less equally the more active the groups are.With more activity being related to better learning outcomes, this raises the question how equal engagement can be supported in problem-based learning.To this effect, Oshima et al. analyzed transactive discourse in collaborative problem solving using temporal network analysis.They found that the distribution of contributions in transactive discourse may not be predicted by introducing fixed or alternating leadership roles but rather by the access to and use of artifacts relevant to the problem to be solved.The paper by Brandl, Richters, et al. sheds more light on the relevance of contributing knowledge and information in collaborative problem solving.In their study about interdisciplinary problem solving in the context of collaborative diagnostic reasoning, successful learning processes were indicated by the learners' conceptual knowledge enabling them to share an adequate initial problem representation.Finally, the study by Rejon et al. compared experimentally different types of sentence starters for novelty and reference to support transactive discourse in collaborative problem solving.The analyses show that sentence starters inducing reference were linked with more engagement in sociodiscursive activities expected to facilitate the co-construction of knowledge in the collaborative learning process.