Within higher education, students and institutions are increasingly moving towards blended components and fully online learning coursework. Best practice online pedagogy is understood to be student-centred with a strong emphasis on social learning through collaboration. The social aspect supports frequency of engagement while collaborative…

Whether by choice or pushed online by Covid, higher education is increasingly happening in digital spaces with digital tools forming a critical part of learning and teaching contexts. While reviews suggest such tools positively influence student engagement, research tends to be generic and more is needed to understand how and why specific tools…

Instructors of college level business courses utilize group assignments to stress the importance of collaborative work in professional organizations for students. How instructors determine team formation, whether assigning students to groups or allowing students to form their own groups, could impact the effectiveness of the group regarding their…

Institutions of higher education are seeking to support more active learning among faculty, and that support includes the creation of active learning spaces to support more student-centered course activities. However, incremental development of these learning spaces leads to a sorting of students between active and passive learning environments.…

Serving as a prominent framework for online learning, the Community of Inquiry (CoI), identifies three factors critical to learning in online environments: teaching presence, cognitive presence, and social presence. However, application of the CoI framework to face-to-face classes has not been broadly or systematically explored, despite…

Traditionally, education has been largely delivered in an in-person format; however, an increasing number of courses are being delivered entirely online or with a blend of online and in-person components. These formats differ along various dimensions, such as the quantity and quality of interpersonal interactions and connections, which will likely…

Teachers' knowledge of the socially shared regulation of learning (SSRL) process of learners, which consists of the task analysis, planning, elaboration, and monitoring, can help teachers intervene when students face difficulties during the collaborative learning. Students' academic emotions have major effects on their learning motivation,…

Two-phase testing assesses individual performance (phase 1) and then allows collaborative learning within small groups (phase 2). While groups typically outperform individuals, less is known about the social decision schemes that influence member collaboration. In a classroom setting, we compared individual and group performance on a standard test…

Collaborative testing has been shown to enhance student performance compared to individual testing. It is suggested that collaborative testing promotes higher order thinking, but research has yet to explore this assumption directly. The aim of this study was to explore the benefits of collaborative testing on overall performance, as well as…

Working in collaborative groups has been shown to have beneficial outcomes; however, these benefits are linked to the quality of group member interactions. "Heedful interrelating," which entails interacting with sensitivity to the task at hand while paying attention to how one's actions affect overall team functioning, is theorized to be…

Due to the realistic, complex natures of authentic cases involved in case-based learning, the use of group work has been encouraged and expected to enhance the quality of interaction among participants and to improve students' learning experiences. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether the case-based online group work increased…

Although a growing literature has documented the effectiveness of informal group work during class sessions, virtually no data exist on which students are collaborating. As a result, instructors rarely know whether students are self-sorting in ways that maximize learning. This article explores which undergraduate students worked together on each…

There is a need to examine the effect of using discussion cases to enrich students' learning outcomes. A research framework was created to study this multidimensional relationship, via the instruments of interactivity, students' time devotion and students' engagement in order to find which factors could improve learning outcomes, including…

With an increasing awareness that many undergraduates are passive during teaching sessions, calls for instructional methods that allow students to become actively engaged have increased. Cooperative learning has long been popular at the primary and secondary level and, within recent years, higher education. However, empirical evidence of the…

In this article, the impact of assessment tasks on examination result (measured by examination grades) is investigated. Although many describe the advantages of electronic assessment tasks, few studies have been undertaken which compare a traditional approach using a classical examination with a new approach using assessment tasks. The main…