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When Group Work Doesn’t Work: Insights from Students

Introducing group work in college science classrooms can lead to noticeable gains in student achievement, reasoning ability, and motivation. To realize these gains, students must all contribute. Strategies like assigning roles, group contracts, anonymous peer evaluations, and peer ratings all encour...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Chang, Yunjeong, Brickman, Peggy
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: American Society for Cell Biology 2018
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6234829/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30183565
http://dx.doi.org/10.1187/cbe.17-09-0199
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author Chang, Yunjeong
Brickman, Peggy
author_facet Chang, Yunjeong
Brickman, Peggy
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collection PubMed
description Introducing group work in college science classrooms can lead to noticeable gains in student achievement, reasoning ability, and motivation. To realize these gains, students must all contribute. Strategies like assigning roles, group contracts, anonymous peer evaluations, and peer ratings all encourage student participation. In a class using these strategies, we conducted in-depth interviews to uncover student perceptions of group work in general and the utility of these support strategies. Students in both high- and low-performance groups still complained of unequal contributions while praising the social support provided by groups. Students who scored highly on tests were more likely to recognize the benefits of group work, regardless of their groups’ overall performance levels, while lower-scoring students perceived group work as time-consuming “busy work” with little cognitive benefit. Comments from anonymous peer evaluations differed only subtly between high- and low-performance groups. Numerical ratings on these evaluations did correlate with overall group performance. However, students in lower-performance groups assigned harsh ratings to their low-scoring members, while students in higher-performance groups were more generous in their ratings for low-scoring members. We discuss implications of relying on support strategies for promoting productive group work.
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spelling pubmed-62348292018-11-16 When Group Work Doesn’t Work: Insights from Students Chang, Yunjeong Brickman, Peggy CBE Life Sci Educ Article Introducing group work in college science classrooms can lead to noticeable gains in student achievement, reasoning ability, and motivation. To realize these gains, students must all contribute. Strategies like assigning roles, group contracts, anonymous peer evaluations, and peer ratings all encourage student participation. In a class using these strategies, we conducted in-depth interviews to uncover student perceptions of group work in general and the utility of these support strategies. Students in both high- and low-performance groups still complained of unequal contributions while praising the social support provided by groups. Students who scored highly on tests were more likely to recognize the benefits of group work, regardless of their groups’ overall performance levels, while lower-scoring students perceived group work as time-consuming “busy work” with little cognitive benefit. Comments from anonymous peer evaluations differed only subtly between high- and low-performance groups. Numerical ratings on these evaluations did correlate with overall group performance. However, students in lower-performance groups assigned harsh ratings to their low-scoring members, while students in higher-performance groups were more generous in their ratings for low-scoring members. We discuss implications of relying on support strategies for promoting productive group work. American Society for Cell Biology 2018 /pmc/articles/PMC6234829/ /pubmed/30183565 http://dx.doi.org/10.1187/cbe.17-09-0199 Text en © 2018 Y. Chang and P. Brickman. CBE—Life Sciences Education © 2018 The American Society for Cell Biology. “ASCB®” and “The American Society for Cell Biology®” are registered trademarks of The American Society for Cell Biology. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0 This article is distributed by The American Society for Cell Biology under license from the author(s). It is available to the public under an Attribution–Noncommercial–Share Alike 3.0 Unported Creative Commons License.
spellingShingle Article
Chang, Yunjeong
Brickman, Peggy
When Group Work Doesn’t Work: Insights from Students
title When Group Work Doesn’t Work: Insights from Students
title_full When Group Work Doesn’t Work: Insights from Students
title_fullStr When Group Work Doesn’t Work: Insights from Students
title_full_unstemmed When Group Work Doesn’t Work: Insights from Students
title_short When Group Work Doesn’t Work: Insights from Students
title_sort when group work doesn’t work: insights from students
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6234829/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30183565
http://dx.doi.org/10.1187/cbe.17-09-0199
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