A DIALOGIC FRAMEWORK FOR ASSESSING COLLECTIVE CREATIVITY IN COMPUTER-SUPPORTED COLLABORATIVE PROBLEM-SOLVING TASKS

Abstract

Creativity and collaboration are increasingly recognised as 21st century skills that schools should foster in learners. To understand how groups, organisations and communities innovate over time, these competencies need to be more effectively cultivated and assessed in individuals and groups. Assessing these competencies, however, has proven challenging, especially in K-12 learning contexts. In the field of CSCL, where the pedagogical premise is that knowledge and competencies are fostered through social interactions and dialogic negotiations, contemporary research has pointed to the affordances of a dialogue-based approach to assessing various learning processes and outcomes. While numerous dialogic frameworks now exist for assessing students’ collaborative knowledge building and problem-solving skills, few frameworks connect these assessments to creative competencies. In this paper we propose a dialogic framework for theorising, measuring and fostering students’ collective creativity in the context of computer-based collaborative problem- solving formative assessment tasks. We conceptualise collective creativity as encompassing a suite of metacognitive, cognitive and socio-communicative competencies, manifest in the interactions of student teams in their problem-solving process. We present the components of our framework and its operationalization through a content-analytic coding scheme. We then apply the proposed framework to a subset of students’ dialogic interactions generated on a computer-based collaborative problem-solving formative assessment task in order to investigate the framework’s potential affordances and to assess issues of reliability and validity. Results indicate favourable inter-coder reliability, and identify statistically significant differences in the dialogic features and patterns of successful and unsuccessful collaborative problem-solving student dyads. We conclude by discussing the limitations and the applicability of the framework as an effective way of profiling and scaffolding learning in online collaborative and creative problem-solving contexts.