Investigating Students’ Collaborative Problem-Solving Interactions during Scaffolded and Non-Scaffolded Ill-Structured Tasks

Understanding how groups interact with the task during face-to-face collaborative problem solving in STEM classrooms is central to the task design process of ill-structured tasks. We examine how the presence of hard scaffolds in the design of ill-structured tasks influences groups’ collaborative problem-solving interactions during the engineering task and final task solutions. Our findings indicate that these scaffolds help students structure the task and engage in collaborative problem-solving processes that are usually neglected, which can improve the quality of groups’ final task solutions and give groups a more authentic collaborative problem solving experience in engineering. These findings support the need to include hard scaffolds in the design of ill-structured tasks for collaborative problem solving in higher education STEM classrooms.