Expertise in Group Problem -Solving: Recognition, Social Combination, and Performance

92 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2000.This study assesses how the recognition of member expertise affects group decision making and group performance. For group members to recognize member expertise, the problem solving task should have three characteristics (demonstrability, consistency, and difficulty) and the problem solving situation should have three additional characteristics (status equality, available diagnostic information, and member/task experience). Three-person cooperative groups and 3 independent individuals solved four consecutive administrations of the Letters to Numbers task in a design having three conditions: four consecutive individual task administrations (I), one individual task administration followed by two group task administrations with no performance feedback followed by one final individual task administration (Gn), or one individual task administration followed by two group task administrations with performance feedback followed by one final individual task administration (Gf). Feedback was based on Time 1 individual performance prior to engaging in the two group administrations of the task. Primary findings indicated that, (1) performance on the Letters to Numbers task was stable over time, (2) both groups with feedback and groups without were well calibrated with respect to expertise within their groups, (3) groups with feedback were not better calibrated than groups without feedback, (4) groups tended to follow a "Double Expert" decision scheme where the highest performing member within the group had twice the influence of the other group members, (5) groups performed at the level of the best of an equivalent number of individuals, and (6) group to individual transfer did not occur.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD