Just because a classroom is noisy or the teacher isn't always lecturing doesn't mean the kids aren't learning. Quite the opposite. The idea is to push students to think differently, to apply what they know, and to create new ideas, instead of just receiving information. That's difficult to see, but easy to elicit with a few key questions. This…

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,…

Group work projects are common components of graduate course curricula. Instructors often try to mitigate the benefits of group work projects for students while avoiding negative effects. Informal learning and participatory culture practices like video logs can enhance learning environments. Video logs that promote both informal learning and…

Quality of healthcare delivery is dependent on collaboration between professional disciplines. Integrating opportunities for interprofessional learning in health science education programs prepares future clinicians to function as effective members of a multi-disciplinary care team. This study aimed to create a modified team-based learning (TBL)…

To promote student learning and bolster student success, higher education institutions are increasingly creating large active learning classrooms to replace traditional lecture halls. Although there have been many efforts to examine the effects of those classrooms on learning outcomes, there is paucity of research that can inform the design and…

Many have discussed the inherent problems in teaching race and ethnic relations courses. Students often come to class with preconceived ideas about their social world, and a range of feelings and experiences including confusion, biases, and misconceptions. Therefore, significant barriers to learning exist before the first day of class. To address…

Cooperative learning is widely recognized as a pedagogical practice that promotes socialization and learning among students from kindergarten through to college level and across different subject areas. Cooperative learning involves students working together to achieve common goals or complete group tasks. Interest in cooperative learning has…

Two aspects of teacher education for cooperative learning are the content taught and the processes used to teach the content. Of the two, the processes used may have the most powerful influences on the desired outcomes. One important theory related to the processes of learning is social interdependence theory. It posits that there are three ways…

With an interest in the role of emotions and values in students' meaning-making in Environmental and Sustainability Education a case study was carried out in a Swedish school-class with students, 12 years of age. During a six-week thematic group-work focusing environmental and sustainability issues related to food, the students were observed and…

In this article Raymond Benton, Jr. describes how he implemented a variation on Eliot Aronson's (Aronson et al. 1978) "jigsaw classroom" activity. While there are similarities between Aronson's jigsaw classroom and what is described here, there are differences as well. In Aronson's system, the classroom was divided into subgroups. Each…

The role of talk in developing understanding in science has been well documented and the recognition of this in the new National Curriculum for England is very positive. The curriculum outlines the need for quality and variety of language in order for children to develop their scientific vocabulary and to articulate scientific concepts clearly and…

The present study used a unique design in which multiple factors were combined in a multiphase study to find if there are any significant interactions among six factors known to be effective in successful group work. The results indicated that the effectiveness of group work depends on how the effectiveness is measured, how the group is formed,…

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…

One pressing issue in resource constrained schools is the lack of access to computer facilities for learning. A single display groupware (SDG) is explored in this paper to provide an alternative solution for this limitation where it allows multiple users to work concurrently on a single computer display. This study aims to investigate the…

In the "Internet+" era, to understand the difference between the traditional classroom and smart classroom, this study uses the current domestic and foreign classroom teaching behavior research methods as a starting point and analyzes the teaching behaviors in classrooms from six dimensions: resource sharing, teacher lecturing,…