The ability to collaborate with others has become one of the most sought-after skills in both education and the workplace, Sarah D. Sparks, an education research reporter, writes for Education Week.

According to Sparks, a survey by the Association of American Colleges & Universities found that more than 80% of midsize or larger employers look for collaboration skills in new hires, but fewer than 40% of them considered new graduates prepared to work in teams. The Common Core State Standards and Next Generation Science Standards both prioritize collaboration and problem-solving skills.

A recent report from the nonprofit Partnership for 21st Century Learning (P21) and Pearson Education, an educational publishing company, assert that communication, conflict resolution and task management are key components of collaboration that should be taught to students. Assessments also are changing to focus on skills needed for group work.

Sparks writes that in 2015 the Program for International Student Assessment added interactive tasks that gauge how well students can develop shared understanding of a problem, take action together to solve it and maintain a team organization. The first test results are expected this fall.

“Without a task that requires multiple perspectives, students simply often divvy up different aspects of a task and then sort of smoosh it together at the end,” Dr. Emily Lai, director of formative assessment and feedback for Pearson Education, told Education Week.

“That's not really collaborating.” Dr. Emma Mercier, an assistant professor of curriculum and instruction, and graduate researcher Susan Kelly, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, are finding similar results in a large, ongoing series of studies of middle school students working in groups.

In one study, researchers asked groups of students using electronic smart tables to answer questions on the nutrition and energy costs of different foods, using different data sources. In the 45 studied discussions, all students could identify and repeat data facts, but the groups that engaged in more data discussion were able to begin to synthesize different sources of information and how they were connected. But, none of these groups were able to synthesize data from several sources without help from the teacher.

In a separate study, Mercier found that regardless of whether middle school students collaborated using paper and pencil or smart tables to solve complex math-based “mystery” problems, the groups in which a student generated the first idea and students then responded to each other produced more ideas for solving problems than those in which the first idea came from a teacher, Sparks writes.

“The elephant in the room when you have students work in groups is, if you don't explicitly teach them how to collaborate, they are not going to do it,” Kelly said. “If you just put them in groups and give them a task, that’s not enough.”