According to a new twist to an international test, American students are much better at group collaboration than they are doing academic work on their own. If true, is that an advancement or setback for education in America? One thing is certain: This first-ever attempt at assessing collaborative problem-solving (CPS) -- the holy grail for workplace-oriented education reform -- did succeed in vaulting American teenagers to a much more respectable ranking among the world’s developed nations than their scores on individual tests of mathematics, science, and reading ever have. On previous triennial testing of 15-year-olds by the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), a project of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, U.S. students’ performance has been mediocre, at best, and often closer to worst than first. For instance, the latest batch of PISA scores from the 2015 round of testing, which were released in November, show American...(Read Full Article)