This teaching brief describes an innovative multi-institutional initiative through which integrated student groups from different courses collaborate on a common course project. In this integrated group project, students are asked to design a decentralized manufacturing organization for a company that will manufacture industrial Proton-Exchange…

The literature on team-based learning (TBL) as a pedagogical methodology in social work education is limited; however, TBL, which was developed as a model for business, has been successfully used as a teaching methodology in nursing, business, engineering, medical school, and many other disciplines in academia. This project examines the use of TBL…

Establishing a Transactive Memory System (TMS) is essential for groups of learners, when they are multidisciplinary and collaborate online. Environments for Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) could be designed to facilitate the TMS. This study investigates how various aspects of a TMS (i.e., specialization, coordination, and trust)…

The history of higher education presents us with many examples of small groups of students living, working, and even eating together in mutually beneficial ways. In recent years, institutions have employed a variety of learning community (LC) models, including residential, academic, and mixed models, to recreate these small groups and encourage…

This paper explores an innovative approach to evaluating the effectiveness of a writing group in an Australian research-intensive university. Traditional qualitative and quantitative methods typically applied in higher-education research may be effective in analysing the output of writing groups; however, they do not always address the affective…

Active participation in classrooms often involves group work. In order to examine the effect of using peer evaluations as part of that experience, this study measured the influence of four formats of peer evaluation on students' perceptions of fairness of the peer evaluation method, its impact on peer engagement, and peer evaluation scores. The…

Now more than ever, the social demands on the University require huge amounts of creativity to respond to the socio-economic context of today's society. Creativity is an ability that requires teamwork as a framework for discussion of the particular ideas of its members, and a scenario for the development of necessary attitudes of tolerance. The…

Histology laboratory instruction is moving away from the sole use of the traditional combination of light microscopes and glass slides in favor of virtual microscopy and virtual slides. At the same time, medical curricula are changing so as to reduce scheduled time for basic science instruction as well as focusing on student-centered learning…

Marketing educators are often faced with poor preclass preparation by students, declining student interest in attending classes as the semester progresses, and student complaints regarding previous bad experiences with team assessment activities. Team-based learning (TBL) is an innovative teaching strategy using semiformalized guidelines aimed to…

Group learning activities (GLAs) are integral components of graduate and undergraduate programmes across disciplines. Students' multidimensional perception of GLAs and preferred learning style influences learning outcomes. Educators need to be aware of the potential for negative learning experiences associated with group activities and provide…

Active-learning exercises appropriate for a course in undergraduate fluid mechanics are presented. The first exercise involves an experiment in gravity-driven tube flow, with small groups of students partaking in a contest to predict the experimental flow rates using the mechanical energy balance. The second exercise takes the form of an…

Group work, an essential component of learning and teaching in problem-based learning (PBL), is compromised if students' experiences of PBL are colored by dissatisfaction with the process or outcomes. For the potential benefits of PBL to be realized PBL group work must be genuinely collaborative to address students' personal and professional…

Multilevel modeling is used to examine the impact of teamwork interest and group extraversion on group satisfaction. Participants included 206 undergraduates in 65 groups who were surveyed at the beginning and end of a requisite term-length group project for an upper-division university course. We hypothesized that teamwork interest and both…

This paper appraises a simulation activity which forms part of the postgraduate social work curriculum offered at the University of Strathclyde. It shows how simulations that are based on activities that are as close as possible to actual "real-life" situations can be applied as a teaching strategy so as to enable students to integrate…

Given the increasing importance of soft skills in the computing profession, there is good reason to provide students withmore opportunities to learn and practice those skills in undergraduate computing courses. Toward that end, we have developed an active learning approach for computing education called the "Pedagogical Code Review"…