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: Student Engagement
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.
“Office Hours are Kind of Weird”: Reclaiming a Resource to Foster Student-Faculty Interaction
Office hours reserve time and space for student-faculty interaction, a benchmark for engaging students in educationally purposive activities. Our study finds a mismatch between the institutionally intended purpose of office hours and student perceptions of office hours. We examine student perceptions of office hours with results from a survey administered at a public research institution. We conclude that it is necessary for institutions — large public research institutions, particularly – to do more to demonstrate to students the value for interacting with faculty and to consistently support the development of relationships between undergraduates and those who teach them.
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.
Fostering Student Awareness of Team Skills: A Participative Team Formation Process for Class Projects
This essay outlines a participative team formation process for class projects with resources to support instructors in implementing this process. This hybrid process, integrating self-selection and teacher assigned methods, includes four touch points that foster students’ awareness of effective team behaviors and the presence (or absence) of these behaviors within themselves and in team members. The awareness can provide students the foundation for developing team skills—beneficial in both team projects and in organizational teams.
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.
Student Perspectives on Using Virtual Reality to Create Informal Connection and Engagement
Following the global pandemic, educators relied heavily on live videoconferencing options and online meeting spaces to host class in lieu of traditional, in-person classroom learning. Yet, exhaustion and Zoom fatigue fueled a lack of engagement in such online spaces, while simultaneously the need for more informal connection to support learners’ emotional well-being emerged. This study aims to better understand how online learners perceive the use of virtual reality (VR) as an alternative platform to informally connect and engage with one another, and to ascertain the impact on their satisfaction and motivation for such engagement. Specifically, the investigation sought to examine participant perceptions of social presence felt, the ability to connect and exchange informally, and the impact on motivation, digital literacy, and satisfaction overall.