Collaborative problem solving (CPS) is an important 21st century skill that is increasingly recognized as being critical to efficiency, effectiveness, and innovation in the modern global economy (Fiore, Graesser, & Greiff, 2018; Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development [OECD], 2017a). CPS has attracted interest in international assessments; national assessments of middle and high school students; and training in colleges, industry, and the military (Care, Griffin, & Wilson, 2018; Fiore et al., 2017; Graesser, Foltz, et al., 2018; Hesse, Care, Buder, Sassenberg, & Griffin, 2015; National Research Council, 2011; OECD, 2017a, 2017b; Sottilare, Burke, et al., 2018). CPS is an essential skill in the home, the workforce, and the community because many of the problems faced in the modern world require teams to integrate group achievements with team members’ idiosyncratic knowledge. CPS requires both cognitive and social skills. From the cognitive standpoint, team members must be able to define the problem, understand who knows what on the team, identify gaps in what is known and what is required, integrate these to generate candidate solutions, and monitor progress in achieving the group goals. From the social perspective, the success of a team requires that members establish shared understanding, pursue joint and complementary actions, and coordinate their behavior in service of generating and evaluating solutions. Successful collaboration can be threatened by a social loafer, an uncooperative unskilled member, or a counterproductive alliance, whereas it can be facilitated by a strong team member who draws out different perspectives, helps negotiate conflicts, assigns roles, promotes team communication, and guides the team to overcome troublesome obstacles (Fiore, Rosen, et al., 2010; Letsky, Warner, Fiore, & Smith, 2008; Salas, Cooke, & Rosen, 2008).

For the first time ever, an international assessment of CPS was conducted in 2015, with the results reported in December of 2017 by the OECD (2017a, 2017b). CPS was selected by the OECD as a new assessment for the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) in the 2015 international survey of student skills and knowledge. More than 500,000 15-year-old students from 52 countries completed the PISA CPS 2015 assessment (hereafter called PISA assessment) in addition to assessments of mathematics, science, literacy, and other proficiencies. The 2017 report on PISA assessment of CPS (OECD, 2017b) had a large number of important results that have far-reaching implications for the public. Only 8% of students throughout the globe performed at the highest level of proficiency (as defined later in this article), whereas 29% of students scored at the lowest levels. Female students had substantially higher CPS proficiencies than male students (in all countries), whereas male students showed a modest advantage in individual problem solving in a previous PISA assessment in 2012 (OECD, 2017). The cultural and ethnic diversity of team members in schools was found to predict CPS proficiencies positively rather than negatively after implementing statistical controls for socioeconomic status. Results suggest that participation in group school activities, such as band, plays, sports, newspapers, and volunteer service activities, were training grounds for developing CPS skills. These are just a few of the many intriguing results in the OECD report. The momentum of interest in CPS has recently had an impact on the United States. In particular, it stimulated a report to the National Assessment of Educational Progress on testing CPS in U.S. schools (Fiore et al., 2017). Assessments like these have the potential to stimulate research, new curricula in K–16 (i.e., kindergarten through 12th grade plus postsecondary education), and new standards in industry, the government, and the public at large.

It is important for psychological science to be part of national and international discussions. This requires fundamental research on CPS to develop and refine socio-cognitive theory as well as more applied research for implementation and evaluation in real-world settings. As researchers in a field of psychological science, we need to identify what we can contribute to help shape answers to key questions and provide solutions to overcome challenging obstacles. Following are some representative questions that cut across cognitive, social, and psychometric research: What proficiencies are included in CPS and how should these proficiencies be assessed? What are the psychological mechanisms that explain and improve CPS skills? What cognitive and social psychological theories can inform and improve our understanding of CPS processes and outcomes? What sort of CPS training should be in school curricula and the workforce? This article was written in part to encourage psychological scientists to be more active partners in this interdisciplinary and international movement to understand and improve CPS proficiencies.

It is important to take stock of where psychological science fits into this evolving CPS landscape. Psychological science has provided a significant body of empirical research on group processes, teams, collaboration, and communication. There have been attempts to differentiate team member contributions from the performance of the team as a whole. However, psychological science research on teams has typically focused on learning in groups (Slavin, 2017), group decision making (Gigone & Hastie, 1997; Hastie & Kameda, 2005; Mesmer-Magnus & DeChurch, 2009), or team training (Mathieu, Hollenbeck, van Knippenberg, & Ilgen, 2017), rather than group problem solving per se. There also is a rich history of investigating the psychology of individual problem solving (Funke, 2010; Greiff, Wüstenberg, et al., 2014; Mayer & Wittrock, 2006; Sternberg, 1995), but there has been only sporadic progress in investigating problem solving in groups. Although social psychology has occasionally investigated problem solving in groups, that work has focused on the generation of ideas with little or no accountability of the solutions, integration of knowledge, and interdependencies among team members (Dennis & Williams, 2005; Mullen, Johnson, & Salas, 1991). The signature features of CPS are the existence of a group goal involving a novel problem to be solved (i.e., as opposed to completing a routine task), objective accountability (i.e., the quality of the solution is visible to team members), differentiation of roles (i.e., team members complete different tasks), and interdependency (i.e., a single person cannot solve the problem alone). This constellation of features is not necessarily the same as that in in collaborative learning, decision making, memory, and work. These latter types of collaboration become more complex and more integrated when considering CPS in real-world settings (Letsky et al., 2008).

We begin by defining CPS and justifying why it is important to study. We then cover the major theoretical frameworks that have articulated CPS mechanisms, measurement, and assessment. Unfortunately, research on CPS is sparse, and the sample sizes in the empirical studies of groups are small, so psychological scientists need to fortify or modify their claims with systematic empirical research on larger samples of group data.

Psychological scientists will need to partner with experts in other fields in interdisciplinary research efforts in order to collect data that will have a maximal impact. Toward this end, this article points out innovative technologies, data science, and quantitative-assessment models. In particular, technological advances have outpaced theoretical and empirical work in CPS. Over the past 2 decades, there has been an evolution of digital technologies that include computer-supported collaboration among humans in chat facilities; automated analyses of natural language; and computer agents that simulate team members, tutors, or mentors. Developments in intelligent digital technologies and quantitative modeling have increased the ability to track CPS processes in rich detail and transform logged data into meaningful psychological measures (Dowell, Nixon, & Graesser, 2018; Foltz & Martin, 2008; Gilbert et al., 2018; Graesser, Cai, Morgan, & Wang, 2017; Shaffer, 2017; von Davier, Zhu, & Kyllonen, 2017). The measures not only evaluate CPS performance but also generate feedback to problem solvers and instructors in summative and formative assessments. These advances are available to psychologists to explore mechanisms of CPS.

Finally, this article considers issues associated with education and workforce policy-level decisions that would draw from research on CPS. For example, we identify national guidance on methods to train individuals on CPS competencies (i.e., relevant knowledge, skills, and strategies). Many of these suggestions are speculative at this point because the fields of psychology and education are only beginning to tackle CPS training, now that the importance of CPS proficiency is acknowledged nationally and internationally. Making CPS skills understandable and teachable represents a policy-level goal that requires close cooperation between stakeholders in research, education, and the government. CPS skills acquired in school activities are expected to improve students’ college and career readiness and thereby benefit society at large (Fiore et al., 2017, 2018; Hesse et al., 2015; OECD, 2017a, 2017b; Quellmalz, Timms, Silberglitt, & Buckley, 2012). There are no widely accepted CPS curricula or standards in school systems at this point (Scoular & Care, 2018). These need to be developed to prepare students to be productive and healthy citizens in the 21st century. CPS curricula will hopefully be influenced by psychological science rather than being entirely dominated by anecdotes, intuition, and folklore.

In our view, the most interesting CPS tasks are sufficiently challenging that they require differential roles and interdependency of team members. Consequently, the comparisons between groups and individuals in these other forms of collaboration arguably have minimal or secondary relevance to CPS. In essence, we argue that the complexity of problems in the 21st century are sufficiently difficult that an individual could never solve the problems alone! Team members depend on the contributions of others in different fields, with different knowledge, skills, abilities, and expertise, to make significant progress in solving the challenging problems of today. Whenever it is obvious that a problem cannot be solved by a single individual, then the important questions for science and practice address how team members can advance team goals in CPS. This leads to the question of why it is important to investigate CPS mechanisms and improve CPS proficiency in schools and the public.

These comparisons of findings from collaborative versus individual performance in learning, memory, judgment, and decision-making tasks would presumably generalize to the CPS tasks that do not have differential roles and interdependency among team members. At this point in team-science research, the body of CPS research is insufficient to assess such generalizations. The impact of a single team member on a group is expected to be different for CPS and collaborative work than for collaborative learning and decision making. An underperforming team member can slide by in group learning and decision making because an individual’s achievements are either invisible or inconsequential (e.g., a single vote is unimportant unless the team vote is close), and the group can readily move on unless there is a stalemate. In contrast, an underperforming member of a CPS team (or a work team) can create a major impasse for the entire team and require replanning and reassignment of team members’ responsibilities. Therefore, there are reasons to be skeptical of whether research on collaborative learning and decision making will generalize to CPS.

Research in collaborative learning and decision making has often compared individual and team measures of performance. In collaborative learning, the question is whether learning is better for individuals when they study alone versus in groups ( Slavin, 2017 ). Measures of learning for particular subject matters are collected later, after the learning process is completed, as opposed to during the learning process. Researchers investigate whether students overall or in various student subcategories show better learning when they were part of groups versus learning alone. In collaborative decision making, the question is whether the accuracy of a judgment or decision is higher when an individual provides his or her data alone versus after a group deliberation ( Hastie & Kameda, 2005 ). There is an objective answer in these tasks, so researchers can measure the discrepancy between the judgments or decisions and an objective standard. The researchers can measure the added value of a group deliberation over and above individuals in different categories (best, second best, average, etc.) after quantitative and statistical adjustments that control for various measurement biases ( Gigone & Hastie, 1997 ). As one might expect, available empirical research does not converge on a simple conclusion regarding whether learning, judgment, and decision making are better in groups versus alone.

Research on the various forms of collaboration (i.e., work, learning, judgment, decision making, or problem solving) have identified a number of factors that influence the quality of the collaboration. For example, simply assigning individuals into groups is not always sufficient to establish effective collaboration. Instruction, guidance, or an activity with clear structure is often needed to prepare individuals for group work. Research in collaborative learning has shown that students in structured groups show better learning outcomes than those in unstructured groups ( Gillies, 2008 ; Vogel, Wecker, Kollar, & Fischer, 2017 ). Social loafing, task complexity, and group composition are additional factors that influence collaborative learning, as discussed later in this article. We expect that these same factors would predict performance in CPS.

Although CPS has distinctive features that distinguish it from collaborative work, learning, judgment, and decision making, there are also some features common to all forms of collaboration. Collaboration has potential advantages and disadvantages compared with completing tasks alone. Some advantages of collaboration are as follows: (a) a division of labor can enhance quality; (b) there are multiple sources of knowledge, perspectives, and experiences; (c) team members are stimulated by ideas of other team members so emergent ideas might evolve from the interaction; and (d) multiple members enhance evaluation of the products of collaboration. In contrast, there are potential disadvantages to the extent that (a) communication is inefficient (e.g., team members waste time with irrelevant discussion); (b) social loafing occurs (e.g., a team member does not deliver); (c) diffusion of responsibility occurs (e.g., team members assume that other team members will complete tasks); and (d) conflict, disagreements, and false information disrupt productive discussion, idea generation, and evaluation.

Fourth, CPS requires interdependency among team members, each bringing different resources to the table, rather than a single team member being able to solve the problem alone. Interdependency is essential for many problems in the 21st century, the complexity of which requires multiple domains of expertise and diverse perspectives that a single individual cannot provide. Individual problem solving is efficient and pragmatically wise to recruit for some problems, but not for a widening array of problems to solve in the 21st century.

Third, there is a differentiation of roles among the team members who take on different tasks to solve different aspects of the problem. This is different from collaborative-decision-making tasks in which all team members are presented the same set of questions to answer, items to judge, or decisions to make, often with access to the same information.

Second, the quality of the solution can be evaluated during problem solving and is visible to team members. That is, the team members can detect whether the group goal is achieved and the extent to which the problem is solved during the course of problem solving. This objective accountability of the quality of a solution differentiates CPS from collaborative learning, which focuses on helping individual students learn a subject matter or set of skills through collaboration, without the requirement that any problem be solved. The extent to which the individual team members learn is typically not visible to team members during the process of collaboration; this learning becomes manifest later on when team members receive test scores on what they know about the subject matter.

First, a group has a goal of solving a novel problem by formulating a plan to move from a starting state to a goal state when no routine plan or script is available ( Mayer & Wittrock, 2006 ; Newell & Simon, 1972 ). It is a group goal because it is impossible or unlikely that an individual will be able to solve the problem alone (for those problems that are suitable for CPS). The novelty of the problem-solving solution differentiates CPS from collaborative work, which normally focuses on coordinating groups of people to perform actions that implement well-established solutions to routine tasks.

Unfortunately, instructors have rarely had the professional development that informs student training on collaboration competencies and that would allow them to provide useful feedback to the students. There presumably is value in systematic training of students to collaborate in varying contexts, disciplines, and projects, over and above simply helping students master course-content knowledge and occasionally assigning group projects with minimal feedback on CPS processes and outcomes. Given the current state of research on CPS training, it is premature to prescribe a specific CPS curriculum. However, there is enough suggestive evidence to point the way forward for initial implementation of alternative forms of CPS training in the classroom as well as informal and extracurricular activities. At present, students rarely receive meaningful instruction, modeling, and feedback on collaboration ( Fiore et al., 2018 ). They are typically graded on the outputs of the task-relevant content of their projects rather than the quality of the process to complete the tasks. Moreover, students may sometimes receive feedback on their teamwork, but the training on CPS is rarely informed by psychological science. Psychological science can play a role in gaining a better understanding of effective training of CPS proficiencies in addition to investigating CPS mechanisms.

The results of a survey by the American Management Association (2012) showed that high-level managers believed that students coming from college do not possess the skills needed for collaboration. They cite an overemphasis on what we would call “task knowledge”: course content focusing on high-tech skills such as math and science, without concomitant emphasis on communication and collaboration. According to a report on career preparation recently commissioned by the Association of American Colleges and Universities, college graduates’ self-perceptions of their own knowledge, skills, and abilities diverge from employers’ perceptions ( Hart Research Associates, 2015 ). For example, nearly two thirds of college graduates believe they can effectively work in a team, whereas only approximately a third of managers stated that college graduates demonstrated this competency. Likewise, more than half of college graduates felt they were able to work with others with different backgrounds but less than a fifth of managers saw this to be the case.

The PISA assessment unveiled problematic deficiencies when it comes to student competencies in collaboration ( OECD, 2017b ). Approximately 8% of students across OECD member countries scored at the highest level (Level 4, as defined in Fig. 1 ). This level demands that students complete tasks requiring complex forms of collaboration on very challenging problems to be solved. The collaboration requires them to overcome social obstacles in team behavior, to resolve or circumvent team conflicts, and to take the initiative to lead the team to handle the most difficult challenges. The results showed that 28% of the students scored at Level 3 and 35% at Level 2 ( Fig. 1 ). The remaining 29% of the students were limited to solving items requiring the lowest form of complexity in collaboration and problem solving (Level 0 or Level 1; Fig. 1 ). This extremely low success rate is very troubling because these are precisely the skills that are needed in the workforce. The experiences of students in and out of the classroom are not preparing them to have the skills that are needed as adults.

The importance of CPS is increasing with the complexity of human social systems and the problems to be solved. As the 21st century progresses, the complexity of socio-technological systems across industry, the military, and academia is ever-increasing ( Autor, Levy, & Murnane, 2003 ; Letsky et al., 2008 ). Concomitant with this, collaborative cognition is becoming increasingly prevalent as societies involve multiple stakeholders and become more dependent on deep knowledge for solutions to difficult problems ( Fiore, 2008 ; Hall et al., 2018 ). Inquiry into CPS mechanisms continues to evolve, given the need to better understand how to improve collaborative processes and solutions to complicated problems. In these environments, teams are required to solve complex problems the solutions to which require integration of knowledge across any number of interconnected systems that are distributed across people and machines ( Fiore & Wiltshire, 2016 ; A. Fischer, Greiff, & Funke, 2012 ). We are not suggesting that individual work will disappear, nor are we denying the inherent creativity that comes from solo endeavors. Rather, we are arguing that, by necessity, many of the pressing problems of the 21st century require collaboration. Because of this, research on CPS must similarly evolve to understand and address the mutual needs of learning and performance by individuals and teams.

CPS Theoretical Frameworks

This section provides an overview of theoretical frameworks of CPS. These have been developed out of an integration of findings on team-based research from the social, cognitive, and learning sciences, as well as national or international assessment frameworks. One fundamental goal has been to reconceptualize the process of problem solving from individual and isolated work to one that involves multiple people with different roles working interdependently toward a common goal. Collaborators attempt to construct a shared understanding of the problem and team goals from a complex set of inputs and subsequently to develop a plan of action that considers the roles, responsibilities, constraints, and tasks of individual team members. This typically is a dynamic, emergent process. That is, individuals within the team, and the team itself, come to comprehend the elements of the problem situation by interacting and by interpreting the information provided by team members as well as by the dynamically evolving situation.

Most CPS theoretical frameworks have two overarching components: (a) the collaborative, communicative, or social aspects that are coupled with (b) the cognitive problem-solving aspects. However, the theories sometimes differ in the details of how the coupling is accomplished between the teamwork and task work. Teamwork is fundamentally social, comprising communication, the exchange of ideas, and a shared identification of the problem and its elements. There are negotiated agreements on connections between the parts of the problem, tasks to accomplish, and potential solutions. There is the need to manage relationships between people, their actions, and the effects that those actions produce. As an obvious contrast to individual problem solving, CPS requires that these elements are transparent to most or all members of the team and that team members are aware of the important elements. A transparent, visible, shared vision and series of updates is critical to the success of groups. In comparison with individual problem solving, in which these steps are internally managed as one works through the problem in a more private manner, CPS introduces added layers of psychological processing associated with social cognition.

CPS has challenges at multiple levels that can hinder the achievement of group problem-solving goals. Regarding task work, there are challenges in accessing, combining, and synthesizing multiple forms of data and information in the service of knowledge integration. There are challenges in formulating plans, tracking progress toward goals, and revising plans when unexpected obstacles occur. Regarding teamwork, there are challenges associated with the collaboration. These include unwise assignment of team-member roles, interpersonal problems that create conflict, communication problems, attitudinal problems, low group cohesion or trust, and coordination problems.

In the remainder of this section, we first provide a summary of social factors and how they might influence CPS. The earliest work on collaboration was conducted in social psychology, so that is where we will start. We then summarize some of the foundational theoretical work developed to study collaborative cognition and problem solving. Next come the two broad frameworks used in international CPS assessments, namely PISA and Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills (ATC21S). This theory-review section sets the stage for the second half of our article, in which we review some quantitative and technological approaches to investigating CPS processes, followed by instructional methods for training CPS skills. As we cover these sections, we identify some of the debates and disagreements that have surfaced in the short history of CPS research, assessment, and training.

PISA CPS 2015 framework As discussed earlier, PISA had the first international assessment of CPS (OECD, 2017a, 2017b). The PISA expert group was instructed by OECD’s Program Governing Board to reconstruct the scientific literature on CPS and to formulate an assessment of CPS proficiency that could be collected from several dozen countries with citizens who speak several dozen different languages. As with all prior PISA assessments, the test takers were 15-year-old students and had a minimum of 1,500 students per country. The expert group was instructed to consider the cognitive aspects of CPS but not the personality and emotions of the test takers. A student taking the CPS assessment was limited to two 30-min sessions. The PISA expert group was tasked with coming up with a succinct definition of CPS competency so the following definition was developed (OECD, 2017a): Collaborative problem-solving competency is . . . the capacity of an individual to effectively engage in a process whereby two or more agents attempt to solve a problem by sharing the understanding and effort required to come to a solution, and pooling their knowledge, skills and efforts to reach that solution. (p. 7) This definition served the purpose of conceptually describing the construct, whereas an assessment framework was also needed to offer more concrete guidance in operationalizing measures. According to the definition, an “agent” could be either a human team member or a computer agent that interacts with the student. The PISA assessment ended up having individual test takers interact with one or more computer agents. The PISA assessment framework has both a cognitive dimension (task work) and a collaborative dimension (teamwork), which is compatible with most theoretical articulations of CPS. The problem-solving dimension in the PISA framework incorporated the four PISA 2012 competencies that targeted individual problem solving (Funke, 2010; Greiff, Kretzschmar, Müller, Spinath, & Martin, 2014; OECD, 2010). Exploring and understanding. Interpreting the initial information about the problem and any information that is uncovered during the course of exploring and interacting with the problem.

Representing and formulating. Identifying global approaches to solving the problem, relevant strategies and procedures, and relevant artefacts (e.g., graphs, tables, formulae, symbolic representations) to assist in solving the problem.

Planning and executing. Constructing and enacting goal structures, plans, steps, and actions to solve the problem. The actions can be physical, social, or verbal.

Monitoring and reflecting. Tracking the steps in the plan to reach the goal states, marking progress, and reflecting on the quality of the progress or solutions. There were three processes on the collaborative dimension in PISA CPS 2015 (OECD, 2017a, 2017b): Establishing and maintaining shared understanding. Keeping track of what each other team member knows about the problem (i.e., shared knowledge, common ground, H. H. Clark, 1996), the perspectives of team members, and a shared vision of the problem states and activities (Cannon-Bowers & Salas, 2001; Dillenbourg & Traum, 2006; Wegner, 1986). Taking appropriate actions to solve the problem. Performing actions that follow the appropriate steps to achieve a solution. This includes physical actions and communication acts that advance the solution to the problem. Establishing and maintaining group organization. Helping to organize or reorganize the group by considering the knowledge, skills, abilities, and resources of particular group members during the assignment of roles. This also includes following the rules of engagement for particular roles and the group, as well as handling obstacles to tasks assigned to other team members. Crossing the four problem-solving processes with the three collaboration processes results in 12 skills in the CPS assessment matrix, as shown in Figure 2. A satisfactory assessment of CPS would assess the skill levels of students for each of these 12 cells, and these would contribute to a student’s overall CPS proficiency measure. Within each cell, one can assess the extent to which the student takes the initiative or leadership in overcoming obstacles rather than being merely responsive to the requests of others or being unresponsive or unhelpful to solving the problem. Download Open in new tab Download in PowerPoint The PISA theoretical framework report (OECD, 2017a) was much broader in scope than this assessment framework. A full description of all of the relevant factors discussed in the OECD report is beyond the scope of this article. We note simply that, in addition to covering the available theory and empirical research on CPS, the report identified the following factors that should be considered in a CPS theoretical framework but were not directly incorporated in the assessment framework summarized in Figure 2: Task characteristics. A number of distinctions were made, such as between interdependent or independent solutions, well-defined or ill-defined problems, static or dynamically changing problems, and team members having the same or different goals.

Problem scenarios. The scenarios were classified into different problem categories (e.g., Jigsaw, consensus, or negotiation) and content distinctions, such as private or public problems, technical or nontechnical subject matters, and school or nonschool contexts.

Team composition. The team members could have symmetrical or asymmetrical status, same or different roles, and be part of groups that varied in size.

Team-member characteristics. The individual team members varied in knowledge (math, reading and writing, science, or everyday knowledge) and psychological attributes (dispositions and attitudes, motivation, cognitive abilities). An example problem scenario and task that illustrates how CPS was assessed are presented later in this article. The assessment covers the skills in Figure 2 and produced the CPS proficiency scale in Figure 1. The sample of test-takers consisted of approximately 540,000 15-year-old students in 52 OECD countries. This sample size is both large and diverse across different languages and cultures. Three major limitations of the PISA assessment framework have been expressed since the inception of this first international test of CPS proficiencies. The first limitation is that students interacted with computer agents rather than other students through face-to-face interactions or computer-mediated communication. The use of computer agents satisfied various logistical challenges, as will be discussed later, but it still raised the concern that the assessment environment deviated from naturalistic, ecologically valid CPS activities. The second limitation is that the constraints of the agent-based assessment cut off a number of the discourse patterns that are central to CPS. In particular, negotiation is a very important conversational pattern that is part of establishing shared knowledge, making a decision, or agreeing on a course of action. It often takes a multiturn exchange between team members to negotiate, but the PISA assessment allowed only one exchange rather than multiple exchanges. Third, as requested by OECD, the PISA assessment did not consider the personality of the team members and their emotions. This logistical decision of OECD is understandable in order to accommodate many countries and cultures, but a mature theory of CPS would need to consider the personalities and emotions of team members.