Chapter 4: Application of Network Analysis in Understanding Collaborative Problemsolving Processes And Skills

ABSTRACT This book chapter introduces the network analysis approach and demonstrates how it can be used in modeling process data collected from collaborative problem solving (CPS) tasks. As an important 21st century skill, CPS emphasizes the abilities of multiple individuals solving problems collectively. To model the CPS skills holistically and to understand the highly interactive processes of CPS, we adopted network analysis to capture the relational data for the CPS skills and for the communication among team members during CPS processes. We review the background of CPS and network analysis, and provide the rationale of using network analysis for understanding CPS. We discuss two case studies to demonstrate how network analysis can be used to model and analyze the process data from CPS tasks.