Using a grounded theory research design, this paper examined the collaborative learning experiences of secondary school students in Singapore. The core phenomenon that emerged was the need for social interactions in collaborative learning, both in classroom and online settings. Educators often take for granted that effective collaborative learning…

This study explores the quality of reflection, and how group diversity affects group reflection by final-year accounting and finance undergraduates using Mezirow's [(1991). "Transformative dimensions of adult learning." San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass] reflection model. Group work and reflective writing are now common assessment features…

Healthy development necessitates that adolescents maintain connections with others while developing an autonomous identity. In the extant literature, however, autonomy and relatedness are often placed at odds, particularly in discussions of girls. We explore how autonomy and relatedness co-occur in girls' interactions with peers and mentors in the…

This study explores reflective experience during transformative, group-based learning among university leaders following a natural disaster such as a typhoon in two Philippine universities. Natural disasters are recurrent phenomena in many parts of the world, but the literature largely ignores their impact on lifelong human learning, for instance…

Given the prominence of group work in mathematics education policy and curricular materials, it is important to understand how students make sense of mathematics during group work. We applied techniques from Systemic Functional Linguistics to examine how students positioned themselves during group work on a novel task in Algebra II classes. We…

This article reports on an exploratory study of giving medals as part of a peer rating system in a question-and-answer (Q&A) study group on Python, a programming language. There are no professional teachers tutoring learners. The study aimed to understand whether and how medals, awarded to responses in a peer-based learning environment, can…

In this paper we explore the data gathered from a group of nine in-service teachers who were trained online to become future telecollaborative teachers. Participants from different countries worked in two small groups in a wiki designed specially to facilitate discussion and collaboration. Tasks included reading and reviewing articles on…

The ability to work in groups across time and space has become a frequent requirement for the workplace and is increasingly common in higher education, but there is a surprising lack of research on how online groups work. This research applies analytic approaches used in studies of face-to-face classroom "talk" to multiple groups in two…

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…

Participation is a complex process, engaging the whole person, implying cognitive, emotional and relational aspects. In online open and distant learning, group work is a commonly used strategy, given its collaborative nature and constructivist framework ([Bates and Poole, 2003], [Garrison and Anderson, 2003] and [Jonassen, 2005]). In this context,…

The goal of this study was to explore the processes of group role formation in online class settings. Qualitative analysis was used to code chat logs and discussion threads in six undergraduate Family and Consumer Sciences online courses that required online group projects. Four themes related to the process of group role formation emerged:…