This original teaching idea uses an adaption of the STEM activity the Paper Tower Challenge to have students examine task and maintenance roles as well as non-functioning behaviors in small groups. While problem solving as a small group, students navigate conflict and frustration, assume various small-group roles, and then reflect on their own and…

Understanding students' participation in collaborative classroom settings is important in a variety of educational contexts, with implications for teaching, research, and equity. Using data from a group-centered developmental mathematics class, this research brief illustrates novel quantitative representations of students' group participation and…

Immersive technologies have the potential to play unique roles in the collaborative problem-solving process. To advance research in these contexts, new methods of documenting group collaboration with technology are necessary. The goal of this paper is to develop and utilize a coding scheme that enables investigation of the nature of collaborative…

New challenges in today's world have contributed to increased attention toward evaluating individuals' collaborative problem solving (CPS) skills. One difficulty with this work is identifying evidence of individuals' CPS capabilities, particularly when interacting in digital spaces. Often human-driven approaches are used but are limited in scale.…

Very often, university students deliberately form self-organized study groups, e.g. to study collaboratively for an upcoming exam. Yet, very little is known about what regulation problems such self-organized study groups encounter during their learning process and how they try to cope with these problems. Therefore, this study investigates how…

This study examines the use of data analytics to evaluate students' behaviours during their participation in an online collaborative learning environment called SkyApp. To visualise the learning traits of engagement, emotion and motivation, students' inputs and activity data were captured and quantified for analysis. Experiments were first carried…

Although cooperative learning is an effective instructional method, it cannot be taken for granted that students will gain new knowledge when engaging in a cooperative activity. Even if cooperative learning is effectively designed, problems might arise regarding cognitive, behavioral and motivational aspects of learning. For students to gain…

The growing adoption of active learning techniques in physics courses requires that students productively engage in collaboration with their peers. Although studies in physics education research (PER) have addressed aspects of group work, the problem persists of how to engage students in collaborative work with appropriate self-awareness, adequate…

The present study aims to incorporate a group leadership promotion approach into collaborative learning tasks in the hope of developing students' creativity, problem-solving, and critical thinking. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, we recruited 59 cross-professional students from a university in northern Taiwan, and…

Biology labs often make use of student teams. However, some students resist working in teams, often based on poor experiences. Although instructors sometimes struggle with student teams, effective teams in biology labs are achievable. We increased student learning and satisfaction when working in research teams by (1) including in the syllabus a…

The integration of hard and soft skills has become increasingly important to employers. Colleges of agriculture and natural sciences can facilitate the development of these skills in their students. The purpose of this study was to explore impacts of a behavioral style learning unit on soft skill development with 15 students enrolled in a…

Researchers have recognized the potential of educational computer games in improving students' learning engagement and outcomes; however, facilitating effective learning behaviors during the gaming process remains an important and challenging issue. In this paper, a collaborative knowledge construction strategy was incorporated into an educational…

School teams regularly meet to review academic and social problems of individual students, groups of students, or their school in general. While the need for problem solving and recommendations for how to do it are widely documented, there is very limited evidence reflecting the extent to which teams effectively engage in a systematic or effective…

Although there is a strong legislative base and perceived efficacy for multidisciplinary team decision making, limited evidence supports its effectiveness or consistency of implementation in practice. In recent research, we used the Decision Observation, Recording, and Analysis (DORA) tool to document activities and adult behaviors during positive…

Examples are given of how spontaneous discussions of school and home problems enabled fourth grade children to seek solutions to difficulties in an open and cooperative way. (JD)