ABS445 - Change laboratory and collaborative problem-solving of preservice teachers - Board 32a

Technologies are increasingly being used in educational contexts creating a need for teachers to develop a set of competencies. Collaborative problem-solving is one of these competencies, and it is considered as essential for teachers of the 21st century (Häkkinen et al., 2016). Indeed, in the classrooms, teachers encounter complex problems whose resolution may require collaboration. Thus, preservice teachers would benefit from developing this competency during their training. In this study, an educational robotics activity was performed to get future primary and preschool teachers to reflect on their collaborative problem-solving competence. During the first phase of the study, 180 future teachers worked in teams of five to eight people to carry out tasks of design and programming of the WeDo 1.0 robot. For the second phase of the study, participants were invited to answer questions about their collaborative problem-solving in a Change Laboratory session. Findings indicate that 64 percent of participants declared to have a level of 3 or less (in a scale of 1 to 4) on the search for external resources useful for problem solving.