Group Work Attitude

ABSTRACT

Group work has many benefits for effective learning and helps graduates prepare for their future work. The purpose of the study reported on in this paper was to examine students’ attitudes towards group works. Participants were second and third year students at Mae Fah Luang University. The data were analyzed using primary source. The findings revealed that there were students who had both positive and negative attitudes towards group works.

Keyword: group work, attitudes

Introduction

This paper is based on the findings from a research examining MFU second and third year students’ attitudes towards group works. This study begins with a brief overview that follows a brief literature review section explaining about group works.

Educational theorists such as Trist (1983) believe that complex problems require input from individuals from many different disciplines, and a collaborative model has been widely and enthusiastically adopted at all levels of education in much of the Western world. Group work is one of the most important class activities for developing students ' communicative ability. Group work refers to any classroom activity in which the whole class is divided up into pairs or larger groups. It also supports a more conducive and cooperative class. Brown (1992) noted that ‟group work provides a context in which individuals help each other; it is a method of helping groups as well as helping individuals; and it can enable individuals and groups to influence and change personal, group, and organizational and community problems”. Konopka (1963) defined group work as a method of social work that is utilized in order to `help individuals to enhance their social functioning through purposeful group experiences, and to cope more effectively with their personal, group or community problems`. Burdett and Hastie (2009) noted that group work is a technique followed to provide an opportunity for students to engage in peer-to-peer learning. Group work could be divided into two types: heterogeneous grouping and homogenous grouping. Heterogeneous means grouping students of different ability levels together whereas homogenous grouping means grouping together students

The use of a questionnaire with both closed and open-ended questions supplied quantitative and qualitative data for analysis. In this way, descriptive information was obtained and was available for interpretation and elaboration of the feelings behind the statistics.

The data were collected from 100 second and third year students at Mae Fah Luang University. Second and third year students were chosen because they have a lot of experience about group work . Ages of the students ranged from 19 to 21years. The sample was randomly selected and comprised …. out of ….. second and third year students at MFU. …..percent ( %) were male and …..per cent were female. …… percent of the participating students were majoring in ……. The average number of times they had taken part in assessable group work was ….times, and each group had an average of three members. Group size ranged from two to 10 members.

FINDINGS Participant responses to the survey questions are summarized in Table 1 and discussed in the following