Abstract
The goal of this research study was to find what makes groupwork to be successful. We asked faculty why they give groupwork assignments to their students and what their opinions about the best practices in creating effective groupwork environment for their students are. It was also intended to compare instructors’ opinions with research findings to find out how much their groupwork strategies match research findings in this area. Likewise, we asked students about features of successful groupwork to see if faculty and students’ viewpoints on features of successful groupwork were similar. The results reveal the most prevalent groupwork strategies practiced by faculty and the favorite ones among students. Results show faculty and students’ attitudes towards groupwork are very similar, however, many faculty do not follow the guidelines suggested in earlier studies to improve the effectiveness of groupwork assignments.
Highlights
Many teachers are using groupwork as a teaching strategy in their courses
The types of group activities reported by the instructors in response to an open-end question included: forming groups to prepare for in-class group discussions, collaborative instructional design, group critique of art works, jigsaw activities related to readings, group essay writing, literature review and sharing, media review/critique, gamification and/or learning sprints, planning special events, peer review, and team debates
The results of this study could be quite useful for teachers who want to start groupwork assignments and those who have been using them but are not quite confident if they are assigning/using group work correctly
Summary
Many teachers are using groupwork as a teaching strategy in their courses. Yet a group of instructors refuse to assign groupwork to their students. The most common teaching strategy used in classrooms has been lectures (Lammers & Murphy 2002) This strategy usually lacks many of the components of active learning, such as critical thinking, self-pacing, and the encouragement of dialogue and group discussion (Fredrick & Hummel 2004). Numerous research studies have demonstrated that small-group learning creates situations in which schoolwork is perceived not as a task or chore but as an opportunity to interact on issues of personal importance (Ahern & Durrington, 1995). From Vygotsky (1986), to the situated learning theorists such as Lave and Wenger (1991), to the current social constructive theorists (Jong, Lai, Hsia & Lin, 2013), have stressed the importance of social interaction in learning. These theorists propose that learning occurs in a social or inter-psychological context prior to its becoming internalized or individualized within an intra-psychological category (Vygotsky, 1986)
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