Share It, Don’t Split It: Can Equitable Group Work Improve Student Outcomes?

Doucette, Danny; Singh, Chandralekha

doi:10.1119/5.0033824

Cited by 14 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…Prior work suggests the presence of inequities in lab roles, particularly for equipment handling [11][12][13]31]. Research also suggests that such inequities are not explained by student preferences, rather something more implicit or subtle happens in the lab as students negotiate their roles [10,19].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploring diverse students' negotiation of lab roles through positioning

Akubo¹,

Sundstrom²,

Holmes³

2022

2022 Physics Education Research Conference Proceedings

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Prior work has found inequities in what experimental roles students take on during instructional labs. Research also suggests that this role division might arise implicitly and that prompting explicit role negotiation might improve equity in lab group work. To understand these various ways students negotiate roles in their lab groups, we use the lens of positioning to analyze two different video episodes of a gender-and-race-diverse group of three students. In one episode, students implicitly take on roles through subtle negotiations and in the second episode, one student explicitly assigns roles. We find that the positioning dynamics in both episodes lead to inequitable learning experiences within the group. This inequity, moreover, occurs along gender and racial lines, prompting future work relating students' intersectional identities to their positioning dynamics in small groups.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploring diverse students' negotiation of lab roles through positioning

Akubo¹,

Sundstrom²,

Holmes³

2022

2022 Physics Education Research Conference Proceedings

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“…It has been found that self-efficacy plays an important role when students collaborate and explain their views to each other, while cementing their knowledge of physics concepts [34]. Prior research involving three or more students [37][38][39][40], e.g. using context-rich problems, shows that it is beneficial to assign roles to students while collaborating with each other such as those of a group leader, timekeeper, skeptic etc.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

How often does unguided peer interaction lead to correct response consensus? An example from conceptual survey of electricity and magnetism

Ghimire,

Singh

2024

Eur. J. Phys.

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In this research, we investigated the impact of peer collaboration and changes from individual to group performance of graduate students on the Conceptual Survey of Electricity and Magnetism (CSEM) without any guidance from the course instructor. We define construction of knowledge as a case in which the group answered the question correctly but in the individual administration of the survey before the group work, one member gave the correct answer and the other gave the incorrect answer. We find that there was a significant improvement in the performance of students after peer interaction in pairs, which was mostly attributed to construction of knowledge. However, students had very few opportunities to co-construct knowledge as there were hardly any situations in which neither student in a group provided a correct answer. We analyzed the effect size for improvement from individual to group scores for each CSEM item to understand the characteristics of these questions that led to productive group interaction. We also compared the group performance of the graduate students to the introductory physics students in a prior study using the CSEM to get insight into the concepts that showed differences for the two groups and those that were challenging for both groups of students. Our findings can motivate physics instructors to incorporate group interactions both inside and outside of the classroom even without the instructor involvement so that students at all levels can learn from each other and develop a functional understanding of the underlying concepts.

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“…This positions students as participants in a community, where students can be peripheral or central in the community, and thus they look at the kinds of participation to evaluate learning. Studies have pointed to the importance of community building rather than dividing up work [7].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Investigating the role of student preparation on cooperative grouping in an active learning classroom

Burkholder¹,

Strain²

2022

2022 Physics Education Research Conference Proceedings

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Instructors new to active learning classrooms frequently ask how they should best structure groups in the classroom to ensure optimum learning. Groups within classrooms are complex social systems with many variables, so unfortunately there is no easy answer. Existing group-formation algorithms do not specify how groups should be structured; they only provide a way for instructors to specify their own algorithm based on factors like GPA or Gender. There are many dimensions of student thinking, motivation, and experience that may be relevant, but here we focus on one measurement that is relatively easy to measure: prior preparation. There have been some studies investigating the role of preparation in cooperative grouping, but each study seems to come to a different conclusion. Here we provide some evidence as to why that might be the case by investigating outcomes based on different measures of preparation and investigating the effects of cooperative grouping for different groups of students. We find that groups that are heterogeneous with respect to physics preparation tend to perform better. Additionally, we find that this effect is particularly pronounced for women and underrepresented students, but not for white men. This would seem to suggest that a reason for disagreements in the literature could be sensitive to how preparation is measured as well as the demographics of the study population.

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Share It, Don’t Split It: Can Equitable Group Work Improve Student Outcomes?

Cited by 14 publications

References 16 publications

Exploring diverse students' negotiation of lab roles through positioning

Exploring diverse students' negotiation of lab roles through positioning

How often does unguided peer interaction lead to correct response consensus? An example from conceptual survey of electricity and magnetism

Investigating the role of student preparation on cooperative grouping in an active learning classroom

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