Collaboration within large groups in the classroom

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to show how a large group of students can work collaboratively in a synchronous way within the classroom using the cheapest possible technological support. Making use of the features of Single Display Groupware and of Multiple Mice we propose a computer-supported collaborative learning approach for big groups within the classroom. The approach uses a multiple classification matrix and our application was built for language-learning (in this case Spanish). The basic collaboration mechanism that the approach is based upon is "silent collaboration," in which studentsthrough suggestions and exchanges-must compare their ideas to those of their classmates. An exploratory experimental study was performed along with a quantitative and qualitative study that analyzed ease of use of the software, described how the conditions for collaborative learning were achieved, evaluated the achievements in learning under the defined language objectives, and analyzed the impact of silent and spoken collaboration. Our initial findings are that silent collaboration proved to be an effective mechanism to achieve learning in large groups in the classroom.

Student Engagement in a Large Classroom: Using Technology to Generate a Hybridized Problem-based Learning Experience in a Large First Year Undergraduate Class

“…Murray and Summerlee (2007) demonstrated that the implementation of PBL in undergraduate introductory classes increased all of these components in successful learning, and these skills were transferrable to other courses for these students. In a large classroom setting the use of technology has been suggested as a way to enable large collaborative student groups without draining resources (Chhabra & Sharma, 2013;Gibbings et al, 2015;Szewkis et al, 2011). These two issues were investigated in this study.…”

Investigating face‐to‐face peer interaction patterns in a collaborative Web discovery task: the benefits of a shared display

“…Previous studies such as Szewkis et al . (), Liu and Kao () and Liu et al . () have investigated peer interaction and shown the effect of SDG with group descriptive statistics.…”

Measuring cognitive load in practicing arithmetic using educational video games on a shared display

“…The fourth approach involves collaboration between students who are sat apart and cannot communicate with one another. In this case, they collaborate silently using functionality provided by the software or more spontaneously by using the movement of their cursors on the shared display, such as in Szewkis et al (2011) and Rosen et al (2014). It remains as future work to study how these approaches and the relationship between them affects the students' cognitive load.…”