This study, conducted in a US setting, examines the importance of group dynamics that emphasize cooperative team building through the proposed grouping strategy called Customized Assessment Group Initiative (CAGI). CAGI is a student grouping strategy designed to operationalize the mutual accountability concept central to the definition of teams by…

Reticence frequently prevents adult ESL learners from learning as much as they otherwise might. The nature of second-language learning requires frequent performance that may challenge students' self-concepts, leading to reticence and self-consciousness. To reduce or prevent this problem, teachers must employ appropriate pedagogical and classroom…

This article is a review approached by the authors as a writing experiment of two recent gatherings where queer theory and Higher Education (HE) Studies met: "The Queerly Theorising Higher Education and Academia: Interdisciplinary Conversations" symposium held at the University College London (UCL), Institute of Education (IOE), (London,…

Educators are continuing to investigate ways to improve student learning through collaboration. This study examined one avenue of increasing student group effectiveness: trust. A model of trust in student workgroups was proposed, where trust mediates the relationships between perceived similarity and individual outcomes (grades and satisfaction).…

Most district and school leaders understand that recruiting group members who have differing backgrounds, perspectives, talents, and personalities makes for good decision-making. Unfortunately, simply assembling a variety of top-notch individuals does not necessarily mean their talents and perspectives will be fully considered. Beth Strathman…

This study investigates how students perceived social loafing and social interdependence influence group learning performance through group affective tone in undergraduate hospitality and tourism curricula. A questionnaire survey was administered to collect data from college students majoring hospitality and tourism management at four Taiwanese…

The authors report on three students' argumentative knowledge construction in an asynchronous online graduate level geometry course designed for in-service secondary mathematics (ISM) teachers. Using Weinberger and Fischer's framework, they analyzed the ISM teachers' (a) geometry autobiography and (b) discussion board posts (both comments and…

There have been calls for decades by many educational writers and commentators for a new model of learning to facilitate what is generally described as twenty-first-century learning. Central to this challenge is the required shift in responsibility for who leads and owns the learning--from teacher to student. Such a shift requires a pragmatic…

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…

Open Space Technology is a cumbersome name for a participative conference model that enables dynamic inclusive engagement and challenges traditional, highly structured hierarchical conference formats. Based on self-organising systems, (Wenger, 1998) Open Space Technology conferences have an open process, start with no agenda and empower the most…

The objective of this article is to examine the participation of Mexican researchers in the state of Tamaulipas who are members of Mexico's National Researchers System (SNI) and are working in academic groups. The paper also seeks to understand their perceptions in relation to the usefulness of this structured System to their individual research…

This paper is based on a study of learning processes within 35 healthcare therapy teams that took action to improve their services. The published research on team learning is introduced, and the paper suggests it is an activity that has similarities with action research and with those forms of action learning where teams address collective…

In this paper we consider discourses of friendship and belonging mobilised by girls who are not part of the dominant "cool" group in one English primary school. We explore how, by investing in alternative and, at times, resistant, discourses of "being nice" and "being normal" these "non-cool" girls were able…

This article examines the use and application of an ill-structured problem to pre-service elementary teachers in Korea in order to find implications of pre-service teacher education with regard to contextualized problem solving by analyzing experiences of ill-structured problem solving. Participants were divided into small groups depending on the…

This article reports on the use of blogs in an online course over multiple semesters and analyzes the participation and meaning making between course participants. The authors used a combination of social network analyses and discourse analysis to show the patterns of participation and the types of meaning making over two iterations of the course.…