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Group Work

Taking Collaboration Seriously

Taking Collaboration Seriously

Like many professors, I use group projects in my classes. When my students work together on a project, I’m hoping they’ll be able to accomplish complex instructional tasks and support each other’s learning on the project and in the course. In my experience, I’ve found

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students working on group assignment

My Students Don’t Like Group Work

Students don’t always like working in groups. Ann Taylor, an associate professor of chemistry at Wabash College, had a class that was particularly vocal in their opposition. She asked for their top 10 reasons why students don’t want to work in groups and they offered

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time to evaluate

A Solution to the Free Rider Problem in Group Activities

Group activities are an excellent way to improve student learning in an online course. But they invariably raise the free-rider problem—the student who does not contribute his or her fair share of the effort. This is particularly bothersome to students when there is one group

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Holding Students Responsible for What Happens in Groups

Many teachers avoid using group work because they fear what happens when students work together—some group members don’t contribute, others contribute too much, there’s no in-depth exploration of issues, some members don’t deliver, others don’t show up, group meetings are more social events than work

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Tips for Addressing Loafing in Group Projects

Group work is a valuable learning device that teaches teamwork skills which students will use no matter what profession they enter. It is perhaps even more valuable in online classes, as more and more organizations are using distributed employees who need to coordinate their work

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Peer Learning and Psychological Well-Being

Peer Learning and Psychological Well-Being

The reasons we should be letting students learn from and with each other continue to accumulate. Here are highlights from a large cross-disciplinary and cross-institutional study that explored the relationship between psychological well-being and peer learning experiences.

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Group Membership: Stay Together or Form New Groups?

For faculty members requiring group work, one of the key logistical questions involves how long group membership should stay the same. Membership can shift after every meeting, or groups can be stable, with the same members meeting together multiple times across a content unit or

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STEM students working on a problem.

Team-Based Learning: Strategies for Getting Started [Transcript]

Making sure students come to class prepared is an ongoing challenge for all faculty members.

With the Readiness Assurance Process, Team-Based Learning (TBL) helps instructors and students alike get past this age-old obstacle. This seminar transcript delves into TBL’s problem-solving framework and discovers how you

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students in exam review session

Understanding Different Types of Group Learning

Small group learning is learning expressly designed for and carried out in pairs or a small, interactive group. Why should we use small group learning in the college setting? Small group learning provides a practical rationale. Most of us have seen the surveys of employers

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