Course: Small Group Communication. Objectives: Students will identify their personality traits; synthesize the relationship between personality, small-group interdependence, and grouphate; and apply collaborative skills and knowledge of individual personality differences in building small-group success.

Collaboration is increasingly identified as an important educational outcome, and most models of twenty-first-century skills include collaboration as a key skill (e.g., Griffin, McGaw, & Care, 2012; Pellegrino & Hilton, 2012; OECD PISA Collaborative Problem Solving Expert Working Group, 2013; Trilling & Fadel, 2009). Such widespread…

Higher education institutions should not only aim to educate academic experts who master their own fields, but also give their students generic skills important in the current society. New teaching methods are required to support the development of such skills. The study examined how a group of voluntary university lecturers re-designed their…

Concern about student retention and success remains paramount in universities both in Australia and overseas, especially in the light of the ongoing massification of higher education, yet current strategies are not necessarily dealing successfully with the changing demographics of student populations. This is particularly so in the realm of…

The rapid proliferation of technology can have profound effects on the evolution of teaching, learning, scholarship, and governance in higher education (Katz, 2008). However, instructors report that simply "keeping up" with new instructional technologies, let alone integrating them productively into one's teaching, can be a significant…

Numerous researchers discuss the solidarity-producing effects of crime, natural disasters and mass tragedies; however, there is much we do not understand about the processes involved in the phenomena. We specify the social relationships that "generate" and "sustain" solidarity by building on Hunter's descriptions of the…

Despite the growing use of virtual worlds in distance education, no studies have shown how self-representation in these environments impacts collaboration in multicultural learning groups. In this article, Paul Wallace and Jim Maryott report on a preliminary study in Micronesia designed to investigate the impact of negative social attitudes based…

The aim of this study was to explore how learners operating in a small group reach shared understanding as they work out joint research questions and build a theoretical framework and to identify the resources and tools they used in the process. The learners' own interpretations of their group activities and learning were also taken into account.…

The focus of this paper is on knowledge-building in a technology-supported learning environment in higher education through a longitudinal study of a graduate course from 2003 to 2007. The primary question is: how do learning conditions designed into a graduate course contribute to collaborative knowledge building? In particular, two major…

With the increasing emphasis in higher education to provide opportunities for students to work and collaborate in groups, enhancing problem-solving and critical-thinking skills, instructors are looking beyond traditional course management tools to emerging technologies. One technology that supports group collaboration is a wiki. However, many…

Describes a student team learning method used in an organic chemistry class at Armstrong Atlantic State University. The Student Teams Achievement Divisions (STAD) method was used in this study. Discusses cooperative learning methods in organic chemistry classes. (KHR)

Seventy-four introductory psychology students were subjects in a study evaluating the impact of cooperative interactions during studying and test taking. Results indicated that cooperative study training affects performance favorably. Cooperative test-taking training also affected recall performance favorably, for the amount of information…

Suggests that classroom exploration of the renga, a chain poem developed in eighth-century Japan, can awaken students' sense of the choices and constraints in writing. (MM)

Notes that writing instructors want to resist authoritarian classroom arrangements because they want students to be active in their education and in their lives. Describes efforts to develop a "new model of authority, a new space," using peer group leaders, advanced standing students who facilitated writing groups in a first-year basic writing…

Investigates out-of-class academic collaboration among students at a polytechnic in Singapore as they worked on collaborative assignments. Data were collected via a questionnaire completed by 232 students, interviews were conducted with 10 lecturers, observations were made of eight student groups as they collaborated on teacher-required work…