This qualitative study explored the experiential group learning experiences of student teachers (STs) who participated in a two-day experientially based group learning programme, as part of their curriculum at a teacher training institute in Singapore. This programme is designed as a personal growth group with an emphasis on value and character…

The author investigates the imaginative play of children online as they seek a common, shared space with others, in which to play. She looks at components of children's online play experiences, including mediated actions, discourses, literacies, sense of belonging, and online restrictions as they moved between digital and nondigital realities. She…

Courses: Small Group Communication, Online Groups and Communities. Objectives: The objectives of this activity are to expose students to common-bond and common-identity group dynamics, including the differences between memberships, as well as member motivations, goals, and outcomes.

While the literature on doctoral writing groups suggests that these groups can have a substantial positive effect on doctoral dissertation completion, little is known about how group practices contribute to their success or failure. This collaborative autoethnography explores the experiences of five doctoral student participants in a peer writing…

Group mentoring programs offer multiple routes for influencing development, through both one-on-one relationships and relational processes in the group context. Less explored is how the group context impacts one-on-one relationships. This study investigated how the group influences the development of the mentor-mentee relationship in a group and…

The cognitive and performance benefits of group work in undergraduate courses depend on understanding how to structure groups to promote communication and comfort while also promoting diversity and reducing conflict. The current study utilized social network analysis combined with self-reported survey data from 555 students in 155 groups to…

Graduate students face many challenges, and mentorship literature calls for adoption of various types of student supports. This Design Case (a form of scholarly writing focused on reflections on lived experiences) tells the story of the development of a "research family" as an alternative to a traditional research group from the…

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the effectiveness of Scrum for project and team management in PBL teams in higher education. To attain this goal, a study was carried out to analyze students' perceptions about Scrum as an effective method for PBL teams. Based on two different editions of PBL that used the Scrum method with different…

Group awareness tools (GATs) are used to enhance awareness among students in online collaborative settings. GATs display awareness information of group processes, so students have a shared understanding of the collaboration. They also encourage students to share their opinions regarding their group processes, which externalizes unspoken awareness…

The author empirically tested an in-class experiential team formation exercise that combines the benefits of professor- and student-directed methods. Previous studies have focused on analyzing the advantages or disadvantages of one method or the other but have not brought together the benefits of both. The present study was conducted over a…

As countless regional, national, and international accrediting bodies continue to employ student engagement measures as mechanisms for quality assurance, universities become more intent on achieving this important gauge of student success. Specifically, the growth in enrollment in distance learning programs adds a unique level of complexity…

Courses: Small group communication and advanced group dynamics. Objectives: After completing this single-class activity, students should be able to: (1) evaluate successful communication characteristics that enhance the group's ability to achieve specific goals; (2) identify small group communication barriers; and (3) develop strategies to…

This study investigated whether an intervention, in the form of short educational sessions, influenced pupils' experiences of group work or cooperative learning (CL). The hypothesis tested was that an intervention for teachers and pupils would lead to pupils' increased (a) collective efficacy, (b) self-efficacy and, (c) positive interdependence,…

Group projects center learning as a collaborative process, but they often produce mixed results in terms of student commitment and final products. The authors outline their experience with a course designed to engage undergraduate biomedical engineering students in a semester-long group experience and share data from their students' analyses of…

This paper proposes and evaluates a model of crowdsourcing in microlearning that includes the balancing of collaborative learning and crowdsourcing mechanisms. The goal of the research is to implement a learner-centered approach through crowdsourced content creation and to improve the process and outcomes of learning. Crowdsourced content creation…