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The research on the assessment of collaborative problem solving (ColPS), as one crucial 21st Century Skill, is still in its beginnings. Using Tangible User Interfaces (TUI) for this purpose has only been marginally investigated in technology-based assessment. Our first empirical studies focused on light-weight performance measurements, usability, user experience, and gesture analysis to increase our understanding of how people interact with TUI in an assessment context. In this paper we propose a research agenda for assessing ColPS of individuals using the Microworlds methodology implemented on TUIs. In a first example item, we use so-called Micro- DYN items, which are independent microworld scenarios that rely on structural linear equations as underlying model. As the MicroDYN approach has been thoroughly empirically investigated for the assessment of complex problem solving of individuals, it offers a good basis for a reliable and valid assessment. We describe how this approach was applied to create an assessment item for a collaborative setting. This item described in this paper implements a simplified model of a MicroDYN item related to climate change using knowledge of previous studies. Therefore, the focus of the item’s construction lies on meeting the requirements for a standardised high quality assessment. Finally, a research agenda is proposed to sketch the main research issues.

The importance of collaboration is growing in an era where knowledge-based tasks are increasingly accomplished by teams of people with complementary roles and expertise, as opposed to individuals doing isolated work. Moreover, the nature of collaboration is shifting to a more sophisticated skillset that includes accomplishing tasks through mediated interactions with peers halfway across the world or even computer-generated agents. The 4 papers presented in this symposium focus on this new opportunity of introducing computer-generated agents in collaboration as well as the challenges entailed. The presentations will cover a broad range of topics ranging from the assessment of collaborative problem-solving skills to the use of computer-generated agents in intelligent tutoring systems. In addition, they will illustrate the validity and practicability of various state-of-the-art approaches to introduce non-human collaborators into human collaboration.

We argue that it is useful to distinguish between three key goals of personality science—description, prediction and explanation—and that attaining them often requires different priorities and methodological approaches. We put forward specific recommendations such as publishing findings with minimum a priori aggregation and exploring the limits of predictive models without being constrained by parsimony and intuitiveness but instead maximizing out-of-sample predictive accuracy. We argue that naturally occurring variance in many decontextualized and multidetermined constructs that interest personality scientists may not have individual causes, at least as this term is generally understood and in ways that are human-interpretable, never mind intervenable. If so, useful explanations are narratives that summarize many pieces of descriptive findings rather than models that target individual cause–effect associations. By meticulously studying specific and contextualized behaviours, thoughts, feelings and goals, however, individual causes of variance may ultimately be identifiable, although such causal explanations will likely be far more complex, phenomenon-specific and person-specific than anticipated thus far. Progress in all three areas—description, prediction and explanation—requires higher dimensional models than the currently dominant ‘Big Few’ and supplementing subjective trait-ratings with alternative sources of information such as informant-reports and behavioural measurements. Developing a new generation of psychometric tools thus provides many immediate research opportunities. © 2020 European Association of Personality Psychology