Communicative Influence: A Novel Measure of Team Dynamics That Integrates Team Cognition Theory With Collaborative Problem Solving Assessment.

We present and test communicative influence as a novel measure of team dynamics that integrates theories of team cognition with collaborative problem solving (CPS) assessment frameworks. We define influence as the degree to which a teammate's behavior dynamically predicts patterns in their team's future CPS state, quantified as the average mutual information (AMI) between the two signals. We evaluated this novel metric in the laboratory with college students (Study 1), in middle school classrooms (Study 2), and in semistructured interviews with teachers (Study 3). In the laboratory study, influence was related to experimental assignment of students' role (i.e., those assigned control over a shared interface had more influence than those who verbally contributed to the solution) and predicted CPS task success and students' subjective perceptions of the collaboration. In the classroom study, the influence was not related to team size (2–4) but was negatively related to teams' adherence to collaborative norms. Analyses of collaborative discourse suggested that influence in this context may reflect the tendency to posit ideas and make claims without building on the ideas of others. Together, these results suggest that if the distribution of influence is dominated by a controlling team member, the collaboration may be less productive and negatively perceived than if influence is more distributed across the team. Feedback from semistructured interviews with four middle school teachers (Study 3) highlighted the potential for influence to be embedded in teacher interfaces (e.g., dashboards) to help them orchestrate classrooms for collaborative learning. Educational Impact and Implications Statement: The proposed measure of communicative influence integrates theoretical perspectives from team science and educational psychology. These three studies suggest that measuring how much communicative influence teammates have on the teams' collaborative behavior may predict both team outcomes and team members' perceptions of their teamwork. Importantly, interpretations of influence were sensitive to the context with different patterns emerging from a lab study with college students compared to middle school classrooms. Further, unlike static measures that are aggregated across an entire collaboration session, influence dynamics can change over the course of a team's time together, making influence a useful real-time and summary measure at the individual and the team level. Feedback from middle school teachers suggests that being able to visualize a measure of influence in their classrooms could enable them to attend to multiple student groups in a busy classroom and check their own perceptions of how student groups are collaborating. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]