Discovering New Knowledge Through Collaborative Learning in Groups

Abstract

We have adopted three principles in freshman-level courses and honors seminars designed for non-science majors in which we also use group learning as a pedagogical tool. We assign authentic learning tasks, elicit collaboration between students, and instill a sense of healthy skepticism about (that is, uncertainty in) the process of gaining new knowledge and also about the “new” knowledge. We expect that group-learning will motivate students to (a) ask and answer questions, (b) replace combative competition with compassionate cooperation, and (c) reject the notion of absolute true-false duality in knowledge. Our experiments with learning include (a) collaborative writing projects with an aim to publish, (b) collaborative decision-making on science policy to produce a consensus report, and c) exploration of natural processes that make up earth-systems science. We have successfully used these strategies in small seminar classes (<20 students) but were unable to adopt similar group-learning strategies in larg...