This single-class activity augments the popular desert island activity to include a secret insider who aims to influence their group covertly. The motivation for this augmented activity is twofold: (1) to highlight and dispel notions of invulnerability to groupthink and (2) to provide an opportunity to engage in small-group decision making. To…

Three staples of management and organizational behavior classes are units on creativity, problem solving, and group decision making. This article presents an experiential exercise in creative problem solving in which the participants attempt to create a cartoon caption both individually and in small groups. The cartoons all come from "The New…

The challenges of designing group assignments in university environments, with the aim of effectively developing teamwork skills, are well documented. It is often assumed that simply placing students in assignment groups will facilitate the development of the task and interpersonal skills necessary for teamwork. However, very often students…

Purpose: This paper aims to provide an overview of the development of learning organization concepts from the perspective of Nancy Dixon, who has been at the forefront of the learning organization discussion since the 1980s. Design/methodology/approach: Through a conversation with Dixon, and a scan of some of her works, this paper discusses…

This research examines the impact of various high-impact educational practices integrated in different group elements (groups course, in-class group activities, and a learning community) on student perceived group work experience related to the Emerging Values model. The Emerging Values model found academic group work to be beneficial for…

Completing a jigsaw puzzle can be a fun activity, but it can also be a learning experience. Here an exercise is presented that involves student teams completing a simple puzzle while at least one of the members is blindfolded. The blindfolded member is the only member allowed to touch the puzzle pieces, and the other team members have to…

This research is motivated by the importance of social skills for elementary school students. Social skills are abilities that must be possessed by every individual to function well in their social environment. Social skills must be instilled through the stages of learning and habituation. One of the approaches to instill social skills is through…

Escape rooms are "live-action team-based games where players discover clues, solve puzzles, and accomplish tasks in one or more rooms in order to accomplish a specific goal (usually escaping from the room) in a limited amount of time." Escape Rooms are one type of Escape Game, which are narrative-based challenges that use puzzles, tasks,…

Collaboration skills have been identified as an important educational outcome, not just as a means to enable learning mechanisms to be enacted, but also as a demonstrable skill of interest to assessment practitioners. In recent years, there has been an ambition to develop models of assessment that are underpinned by the collaborative process, and…

Collaborative problem solving (CPS) is a critical competency in a variety of contexts, including the workplace, school, and home. However, only recently have assessment and curriculum reformers begun to focus to a greater extent on the acquisition and development of CPS skill. One of the major challenges in psychometric modeling of CPS is…

Peer-led team learning (PLTL), specifically the model known as 'Workshops', has been shown to contribute positively and significantly to student success in STEM courses across subjects (Gosser et al., 2001). Our research adds to the SOTL literature describing the effectiveness of Workshops by reporting on the changes in student leaders. We examine…

Student learning communities (SLCs) are more than just a different way of doing group work. Like the professional learning communities they resemble, SLCs provide students with a structured way to solve problems, share insight, and help one another continually develop new skills and expertise. With the right planning and support, dynamic…

Today, much problem solving is performed by teams, rather than individuals. The complexity of these problems has exceeded the cognitive capacity of any individual and requires a team of members to solve them. The success of solving these complex problems not only relies on individual team members who possess different but complementary expertise,…

Providing students with assignments that focus on critical thinking is an important part of their scientific and intellectual development. However, as class sizes increase, so does the grading burden, prohibiting many faculty from incorporating critical thinking assignments in the classroom. In an effort to continue to provide our students with…

In this paper, we present a teaching proposal used in an Introductory Physics course to civil engineering students from Porto's Engineering Institute/Instituto Superior de Engenharia do Porto (ISEP). The proposal was born from the need to change students' perception and motivation for learning physics. It consists in the use of an integrator…