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…

A convenience sample of 13 students aged 9-16 years participated in this exploratory phenomenological study of what high- and otherwise-achieving students' expected they would experience when engaging in classroom group work. From questionnaire and interview data, students generally expected small group sizes, were divided about who forms groups,…