In business higher education, group project work plays an essential role. The purpose of the present study is to explore the relationship between the group heterogeneity of students' business project groups and their academic achievements at both group and individual levels. The sample consists of 536 freshmen from an International Business School…

Parental involvement is crucial to facilitating a child's high school success and enhancing their post-secondary opportunities. Unfortunately, the ability for Latina/o parents and guardians to engage in parental involvement is hindered by a general lack of familiarity with U.S. educational systems and post-secondary options. With these…

Many students cringe and groan when told that they will need to work in a group. However, group work has been found to be good for students and good for teachers. Employers want college graduates to have developed teamwork skills. Additionally, students who participate in collaborative learning get better grades, are more satisfied with their…

This article presents an interview with Richard Chait, Research Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, regarding the three major challenges that face college and university governing boards today--in the areas of board structure, planning, and trustee selection. In the interview, Chait shares his concern about the state of…

Commonly accepted ideas, on the one hand, about how small groups in a writing class should work and, on the other hand, psychological research about what makes a small group work well are not consistent. Social psychologist Clovis Shepherd claims that the "popular notion that the democratic ideal is a group in which all members exert an equal…

Compares decision processes of consensus and devil's advocacy within an additive task, a disjunctive task, and a conjunctive task structure. Finds that high-conflict decision processes such as devil's advocacy enhances decision making in disjunctive tasks, retards decision making in additive tasks, but has no effect on decision making in…

Examined applicability of Bednar, Melnick, and Kaul's model of early group development to college student self-help groups using undergraduates (N=101) who met in high-structure or low-structure groups. Found amount of group structure was positively related to ownership of group functioning; importance of performing group behaviors was positively…

The report contains topics included in a plan for research on academic groups and collectives which might be as follows: The mechanism for regulating the effectiveness of people's interactions and conditions governing the selection and recruitment for academic groups and collectives; Methods of evaluating the social-psychological characteristics…

Compared performances for male and female groups using three different group problem-solving procedures: unstructured, structured-open, and structured-forced. Results indicated that female groups performed better with the structured-forced procedure than with the structured-open procedure. Male groups performed better with the structured-open…

To investigate gender effects on computer-mediated communication, undergraduate psychology students were put in small groups (males, females, or mixed) and were assigned feminine content (decision making) and masculine content (intellective) task types. Groups of females, regardless of task, sent more words per e-mail message, were more satisfied…

Discusses the differentiation of the American professoriate on the following primary dimensions of professionalism: (1) patterns of work; (2) identification; (3) authority; (4) career; and (5) association. Argues that integration is accomplished through overlap of subcommunities, rather than through socialization or similar functions. (FMW)

Describes an encounter group process using Van Servellen's (1984) systems' model and Yalom's (1985) therapeutic factors as a guide for analysis to resolve conflict among faculty. Presents use of structure, communication, and process components of the model that provided direction for group leaders to analyze small group interactions and select…

The performance of 43 library work groups was assessed by means of supervisor's ratings. Characteristics of the groups' tasks, membership, leadership, structure, and process were measured by averaging their members' responses to factor of the Work Group Survey. The implications for both organization theorists and change agents are discussed.…

An underinvestigated aspect of advertising education is the consideration of methods by which groups effectively solve creative problems. Brainstorming has been popularly used by teams in classes to generate ideas; yet, little research exists that compares small group structures for creative problem solving. Bridging this gap, a study compared…

It has been suggested that individuals differ in the extent to which they monitor self-perceptions in social situations: high self-monitors use cues about the appropriateness of various types of behaviors to determine their social behavior, while low self-monitors control their social behavior by their own attitudes rather than by the demands of…