Journal of Chemical Education has published the manuscript entitled An Assessment of the Effect of Collaborative Groups on Students' Problem-Solving Strategies and Abilities in their June 2008, (Volume 85, No. 6, pp. 866-872) issue. This paper reports the use of a suite of software tools and pedagogies to probe the effectiveness of using small group interaction to improve problem solving. Data modeling using artificial neural nets (ANN), hidden Markov modeling (HMM), and item response theory (IRT) is discussed. Authors: Cooper, Melanie M.; Cox, Charles T., Jr.; Nammouz, Minory; Case, Edward; Stevens, Ronald.