Both theory and research support the use of group activities to aid student learning. However, some students are reluctant to learn with peers for fear that the peers will gain more. The article attempts to address this fear. This article provides educators with explanations to give their students as to why, even in norm referenced assessment environments, by helping their groupmates, students are positively, not negatively, impacting their own success on assessments. The article opens with a review of assessment options: norm referenced, criterion referenced and ipsative. Next, Social Interdependence Theory is explained for the insights it might offer as to how students view their peers’ success. The article’s third section summarises some of the research on peer learning, in particular research on what forms of peer interaction might best promote learning. Finally, the article examines three contexts in which norm referencing is applied – standardised exams, class grades and class ranking – and concludes that the chances are small of groupmates’ success diminishing the success of students who have helped their groupmates. This conclusion is reached based, first, on mathematical calculations and, most importantly, on the research based premise that when students provide elaborated help to groupmates, the helpers are likely to boost their own scores.
Tag: Social Learning
Making it All Count: A Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration Model Incorporating Scholarship, Creative Activity, and Student Engagement
This study takes a grounded theory approach as a basis for a case study examining a cross-disciplinary artistic and academic collaborative project involving faculty from the areas of English, music, dance, theatre, design, and visual journalism resulting in the creation of research, scholarly, and creative activity that fosters student engagement with feedback, reflection, and mentorship. An emergent conceptual model of artistic and academic collaboration was developed featuring a combination of collaborative partnership, creative process, and product dissemination with feedback and reflection leading to greater collaborative partnership as well as a new community of practice for cross-disciplinary collaboration.
A Process and Outcome Evaluation of a One-Semester Faculty Learning Community: How Universities Can Help Faculty Implement High Impact Practices
This process and outcome qualitative study describes and critically assesses the experiences of the faculty who participated in the one-semester FLC addressing CLTs through a content analysis of individual narratives completed at the end and ten months after the FLC ended. The existence and contributions of four prerequisites for successful collaboration (Einbinder, Robertson, Garcia, Vuckovic & Patti, 2000) are introduced to explain this FLC’s success and then extended to suggest how future FLC initiatives can expand and improve on these accomplishments.
Social Learning via Improved Daily Writing Assignments, Implementation of Study Groups, and Well-Structured Daily Class Discussions
As recent scholarship emphasizes the value of social learning, this article describes a course redesign that sought to encourage such social learning. This multi-year course redesign includes altering a daily writing assignment to make it more specific and to make it a contribution to the learning of a study group. Data was collected and evaluated to explore the effectiveness of this change. The author also offers reflections on how the course redesign encouraged social learning via study groups and how the redesign made daily class discussions more deliberate and robust.
Using Student Perceptions of Collaborative Mapping to Facilitate Interdisciplinary Learning
This article reports on a study that investigated student perceptions of the effectiveness of collaborative mapping as a teaching strategy to facilitate interdisciplinary learning. Forty-five students enrolled in an introduction to interdisciplinary studies course participated in the study. Qualitative data, collaborative maps and student evaluations were analyzed using content and thematic analysis. Findings provide new understandings about using student perceptions of learning experiences to inform classroom practice. These understandings have implications for addressing the increasing pressure to demonstrate teaching effectiveness and learning outcomes in higher education.
Collaborative Pedagogy in a Design Thinking Education Course
This article describes a co-taught course that mobilized a Design Thinking approach in the service of creating a prototype for an actual girls’ boarding school in Kenya. The goal of the class was to allow students to engage collaboratively with faculty, with their peers, and with experts “on the ground” to develop the various parts of the school, from the mission to the curriculum to the building design. The article describes the rewards and complexities of this kind of hands-on pedagogy in a higher education context.
Collaborative Autoethnography: Best Practices for Developing Group Projects
Collaborative Autoethnography (CAE) is an emerging practice that combines group interaction with qualitative research. Group projects are often deployed in course design to maximize the value of collaborative learning environments. Using existing scholarship, we describe best practices for group projects that apply principles of CAE. To advance the premise of the paper beyond descriptive summaries of pedagogical inquiry, we utilize a best practices mechanism to present a coherent guide for project collaborators to use in various classroom settings. The best practices proposed are research validated by existing CAE and project management literature.