Identifying emergent roles and their relationship with learning outcomes and collaborative problem-solving skills

Collaborative problem-solving (CPS) has become essential in today's society because it provides opportunities for deep learning and critical thinking. During CPS, students tend to spontaneously adopt different roles that facilitate the interactive process. Previous studies have focused on the influence of emergent roles on learning outcomes and CPS skills, but have rarely used procedural approaches to analyze the diversity of and changes in emergent roles during CPS. The availability of naturally occurring educational discourse data provides the opportunity to identify emergent roles at a fine-grained level. Therefore, this study identified emergent roles based on fine-grained coding and used hierarchical regression and epistemic network analysis to explore the influence of emergent roles on learning outcomes through CPS activities and their co-occurrence with CPS skills. The identification of emergent roles was based on observations of 54 undergraduates and postgraduates. The results showed that the participants played different, flexible roles during the CPS process. Roles focused on content and performance appeared more frequently, while those related to social emotion and evaluation were relatively less frequent. Furthermore, knowledge seeker and distractor significantly impeded the success of CPS activities, and harmonizer was conducive to high-quality learning outcomes. In addition, information giver always co-occurred with the skills of maintaining team function. Content- and performance-focused roles usually appeared together with negotiation and coordination. These findings highlight the importance of emergent roles during the CPS process, and provide some practical suggestions for improving learning outcomes and CPS skills.