Managing Uncertainty During Collaborative Problem Solving in Elementary School Teams: The Role of Peer Influence in Robotics Engineering Activity

Abstract

This study investigated how interaction with peers influenced the ways students managed uncertainty during collaborative problem solving in a 5th-grade class. The analysis focused on peer responses to individuals' attempts to manage uncertainty they experienced while engaged in collaborative efforts to design, build, and program robots and achieve assignment objectives. Patterns of peer response were established through discourse analysis of work sessions for 5 teams engaged in 2 collaborative projects. Three socially supportive peer responses and 2 unsupportive peer responses were identified. Peer interaction was influential because students relied on supportive social response to enact most of their uncertainty management strategies. This study provides a useful theoretical contribution to understanding the roles of peer interaction in collaborative problem solving. Conceptualizing collaborative problem solving as a process of negotiating uncertainties can help instructional designers shape tasks and relational contexts to facilitate learning.

Noticing, Assessing, and Responding to Students' Engineering: Exploring a Responsive Teaching Approach to Engineering Design

“…Engineers on design teams must continuously negotiate uncertainty between team members, competing design criteria and constraints, and alternative analyses of design scenarios 34,35,36 . They rely on multiple modes of external representation to instantiate design ideas and analytical results 37,38,39 .…”

Investigating Middle School Students’ Perceptions of Communication Challenges in Collaborative Engineering Design Learning (Fundamentals)

“…Drawing from previous research on peer-to-peer interactions during collaborative work (See, for example, 8,9,21,22,23 ), we identified two social issues (negotiating roles and responsibilities, evaluating progress) and two task issues (understanding the task specifications, generating design ideas) that present communication challenges for individuals engaged in collaborative design activity: negotiating roles and responsibilities; evaluating task progress and group interaction; understanding the task; and generating new ideas or solutions. These communication challenges became the basis for reflective survey questions, observers' notes, and class debriefings.…”

“…Our interest grew out of previous findings indicating that students encounter communication challenges related to task, relational, and identity issues when collaborating on engineering design projects. 8,9 Even professional designers struggle with these complex issues, frequently encountering misunderstandings, avoidance of conflict, and persuasion to achieve adoption of ideas and actions . 10 Negotiating these social processes is particularly difficult for young adolescents who are still developing the metacognitive capacities required for such negotiation 11 and confronting new relational concerns.…”

From Pretending to Engineering: An Examination of Students' Dynamic Engagements in Novel Engineering Design Activities (Fundamental)

“…Qualitative accounts of elementary students engaging in engineering design indicate that students have nascent abilities for reasoning and acting as beginning engineers: they navigate their own design processes by interacting with the social and material elements of the design situation 14,15 , reason about uncertainty 16 , and scope complex problems 17 . Roth's (1995Roth's ( /1996 study of fifth graders engaging in engineering illustrates how the Page 26.804.2 students iteratively shape and reform their goals as they "construct, reconstruct, resolve, and abandon multiple interacting problems" (p. 366).…”