Yasunobu Onishi

ON THE EFFECT OF INTRODUCTION OF THE INDIVIDUAL WORK STAGE INTO THE PROBLEM SOLVING DISCUSSION

The aim of this paper is to test, through the experiment, that the result of problem solving discussion can be improved by introducing individual work stage in the beginning. The authors adopted “The Moon Survival Task” developed by NASA in United States to the experiment. The 30 minute experiment was carried out with two groups of three 3-student teams: teams that introduced 15 minutes individual work stage before 15 minute discussion (on-team) and those that made 30 minute discussion without individual work (off-team). The major findings can be summarized as follows;1) The on-team achieved more accurate team answer after the discussion compared with the off-team.2) The individual answer of on-teams, submitted after the discussion, also became much more accurate than those for off-teams.3) These differences in two groups are caused by the difference in the level of the consensus achieved through the discussion, though the length of discussion-time for on-team is only a half of that for off-team.