Assessing Student Achievement in Probability Problem Solving Using Collaboration Process Data

Collaborative problem solving (CPS) is a critical competency, because much of the work people do occurs in a social context involving direct collaboration. Meanwhile, schools are being pressured to reduce the amount of time devoted to large-scale assessments, and to adopt more natural or authentic assessments. It may be possible to address both these issues at once, if collaboration experiences are viewed as opportunities to assess student achievement.However, several issues arise in evaluating individuals’ problem solving skills in a collaborative context: (1) collaborative learning outcomes may obscure individuals’ contributions, making it difficult to isolate individuals’ performance; (2) outcome-based measures may ignore the processes of individuals’ or groups’ problem solving, thus leading to inaccurate estimations of individuals’ or groups’ knowledge, abilities and skills; and (3) prior evaluative focus of CPS research has usually been on social aspects of collaboration rather than domain-relevant cognitive skills. Therefore, the present study aimed to develop a process-based scoring rubric to evaluate individual student achievement in problem solving using collaboration proc