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We present and test communicative influence as a novel measure of team dynamics that integrates theories of team cognition with collaborative problem solving (CPS) assessment frameworks. We define influence as the degree to which a teammate’s behavior dynamically predicts patterns in their team’s future CPS state, quantified as the average mutual information (AMI) between the two signals. We evaluated this novel metric in the laboratory with college students (Study 1), in middle school classrooms (Study 2), and in semistructured interviews with teachers (Study 3). In the laboratory study, influence was related to experimental assignment of students’ role (i.e., those assigned control over a shared interface had more influence than those who verbally contributed to the solution) and predicted CPS task success and students’ subjective perceptions of the collaboration. In the classroom study, the influence was not related to team size (2–4) but was negatively related to teams’ adherence to collaborative norms. Analyses of collaborative discourse suggested that influence in this context may reflect the tendency to posit ideas and make claims without building on the ideas of others. Together, these results suggest that if the distribution of influence is dominated by a controlling team member, the collaboration may be less productive and negatively perceived than if influence is more distributed across the team. Feedback from semistructured interviews with four middle school teachers (Study 3) highlighted the potential for influence to be embedded in teacher interfaces (e.g., dashboards) to help them orchestrate classrooms for collaborative learning. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)
