ABSTRACT
Collaborative problem solving involves the active exchange and interaction of ideas between two or more people and such interactive exchanges can result in the joint production of co-constructed ideas, some of which may be novel. We analyzed verbal data of pairs of students collaboratively solving problems posed by a computer workplace simulation (a banking business), and then individually solving two transfer problems, in order to examine the frequency of occurrence of co-constructed novel ideas, and the subsequent individual reuse of these co-constructed ideas. The results show that in collaborative interactions, about 20% of the task-relevant ideas were produced jointly, whereas about 80% of the utterances were produced individually (i.e., they were self-explanations). However, about half of these jointly produced ideas (or 10%) were novel. Moreover, individual collaborators were able to reuse these jointly constructed ideas to solve transfer problems. Finally, more interactive collaborative pairs produced a higher proportion of jointly constructed ideas than less interactive pairs, and individual members of more interactive pairs reused jointly constructed ideas more than low interactive pairs.
