Task Variation and Mental Models Divergence Influencing the Transfer of Team Learning

We investigate how teams develop and transfer general problem-solving
skills across two ill-structured problems. We draw on cognitive flexibility
theory in the instructional literature and propose that teams will achieve a
higher performance on a novel task or transfer when they receive an external
task intervention (i.e., task variation) and when the internal mechanisms
(i.e., divergent mental models) are developed to make sense of the
external intervention. To test these predictions, we designed a longitudinal
experiment with 17 student teams that encountered task variation during
their work on an initial task. Consistent with our predictions, we found that
teams that experienced variations and whose mental models diverged during
their work on an initial task achieved higher performance on a novel task
than teams that experienced variation and whose mental models converged.
Implications for the transfer of learning in teams on ill-structured problems
are discussed.