Serious and Playful Inquiry: Epistemological Aspects of Collaborative Creativity (Report‪)‬

The purpose of this paper is to further our understanding of collaborative creativity among middle-school students. National technology standards expressly discuss creativity as a desired learning outcome for K12 students (International Society of Technology in Education, 2007). This may be due to an envisioned need to address increasingly complex societal problems through innovation. Sonnenburg (2004) argues that collaborative teams will be an essential aspect of such creative work in the future. Collaborative creativity, then, is an important yet relatively new focus of research (Sawyer & DeZutter, 2009). As such, there is a limited amount of K12 educational research related to this topic. The research that does exist has shed light on two areas of collaborative creativity: group dynamics and local classroom practices. Developing a shared understanding of a task through intersubjectivity is a key aspect of successful collaborative problem-solving (Roschelle & Teasley, 1995). However, it seems that for creative solutions, some level of disagreement or conflict regarding the task increases the groups' overall creativity (Chiu, 2008; Kurtzberg & Amabile, 2001), whereas personal or processual conflict will negatively affect the groups' creativity (Etelapelto & Lahti, 2008). Vass, Littleton, Miell, and Jones (2008) found that for a collaborative creative-writing task, students' emotional reactions to the assignment also affect the quality of their creative work.