Validating the Shared Understanding Construction in Computer Supported Collaborative Work in a Problem-Solving Activity

Abstract

Computer-Supported Collaborative Work is a multidisciplinary research field and is the core of our society, forged with difficulties and benefits, however, one of its main problems is that the collaboration success is difficult to achieve and probably impossible to guarantee or even predict. Given that collaboration is a coordinated, synchronized activity and it is the result of a continuous attempt to construct and maintain a shared conception of a problem, it can be inferred that for collaboration to occur, there must be a shared understanding of the problem that it is being resolved. For this reason, the shared understanding of the task is an important determinant of the performance of groups. This is why this paper presents an initial proposal of a process for the shared understanding construction in a problem-solving activity, specifically, it shows the validation of the feasibility and usefulness of the process in this construction. For validation, an experiment was carried out with students from two Latin American universities that verified the shared understanding construction through the proposed process, confirming the experiment hypotheses about its feasibility and utility and, in this way, was discovered aspects to improve from the ambit of the high cognitive load that generates and the need to monitor and assist to this shared understanding.