High-Achieving Students’ Expectations About What Happens in Classroom Group Work: A Review of Contributing Research

Abstract

High-achieving students’ work-alone preference has been shown to be largely false and to depend on the learning context. However, the literature has not distinguished preferences from expectations, nor directly examined what students expect will occur in classroom group work. An attempt to systematically review group-work expectations yielded just one relevant study from 768 initial sources. Instead, this generic (or critical) review gathered evidence primarily from the preferences literature indicating hypotheses about expectations. That literature suggested seven variables possibly related to high achievers’ group-work expectations: prior acceptance or rejection of their contributions in group work, choice with whom one works, having a supportive friend in the group, control over the group-work structure, fairness of work distribution, task difficulty, and parental opinions.