Collaborative Group Work

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1.0 Introduction
Active learning has been one of the major focus in the Polytechnic in order to create engaging, fun and creative learning environment. Collaborative learning and group work are an important element of active learning. Several studies have also shown that students prefer strategies promoting active learning to traditional lectures (Bonwell, 1991). In addition, students of today are of a very different generation compared to decades ago. Students of today prefer collaborative group work (Black , 2010) Therefore group project works has been widely used in the Polytechnics to engage students. Educators also favours group work because it can offer students the opportunities to work on more complex and challenging tasks. Furthermore, …show more content…

This lead to poor group management and therefore misunderstanding among the group members. Students might have problems distributing work for each individual members and therefore resulting in free riding. The lecturers may have also contribute to the result of free riding. This is because when lecturers assign group work to the students they need to be aware of the complexity of the tasks, suitability of the tasks as group work and the appropriate number of students per group to accomplish the tasks. If the group number is too big and there are insufficient tasks to be split among the group members, this will inevitably result in free riding. A few authors (example, Cooper, 1990 and Johnson, 1998) suggested a group size of four to five students per group because bigger groups will impede student’s participation and therefore stipulate lesser opportunities for them to learn and improve their skills. Poor group management will also result in the smarter students taking up majority of the workload because the smarter students are worried of their marks being affected due to inadequacy of confident in their group members and therefore they presume that their group members will produce poor quality work. The smarter students will then develop feeling of injustice by sharing the final grade with the presumed weaker students. Social loafing has also contribute its fair share to …show more content…

When we are designing assessments for group work, we need to consider the appropriate strategies to enhance the quality of the students’ learning experience within the context of a group (Morris and Hayes, 1997). Formative assessments can be considered as an effective strategy as it is very critical to help in attaining the desired learning outcomes of group works and as Sadler (1998) has said, “Formative assessment does make a difference, and it is the quality, not just the quantity, of feedbacks that merits our closest attention”. When we consider fairness and equity in group assessment, maybe it is more appropriate to design group work assessment that include individual component for differentiating each group member’s mark to reflect quantity and quality of individual’s work. This will therefore prevent free riding and social loafers. We need to also determine if the end product of a group work the key of the learning outcome or it is the processes and skills acquired through the process that are more important or both are equally important. Only when we are clear of our learning outcomes and what we want to assess, then can we design an effective group work

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