PRE-SERVICE PRIMARY SCHOOL TEACHERS’ COLLABORATIVE PROBLEM SOLVING SKILLS

Collaborative problem solving is an important skill at almost any workplace, thus developing this skill should be an important goal of school education. This skill can be developed started in primary school, as it is important that primary school teachers own this skill and they know the methodology to develop is. The aim of this paper is to study pre-service primary school teachers’ collaborative problem solving skill. Students were asked to solve two challenging mathematical problem individually, then they were grouped by 3 and asked to solve the same problems in the group. Each group was observed during their work. Students’ individual and group problem solving was qualitatively analyzed and the observations during group work were investigated and organized. The results show that students have difficulties in working in groups, as in many cases group-work was limited: one student solved the problem and explained it to the others; rarely students really collaborated for solving the problems. The results show the importance of developing students’ collaborative problem solving skill.