Teacher education students' strategic activities in challenging collaborative learning situations

This study gives voice to individual students' reflective interpretations of the challenges that they face during collaborative learning. It shows how students describe their strategic activities to overcome these challenges and illustrates how the described challenges are actualized in practice. Forty-three second-year teacher education students worked in small groups during a seven-week didactic math course. Individual students were interviewed after the course and asked about their interpretations of their collaboration in general, as well as their applied strategic activities during challenging collaborative learning situations. The data was complemented with two student groups' video recordings dealing with the group work in order to analyze how the students identified challenges during their collaboration and what types of strategic activities they used to solve these issues. The results showed how students' strategic activities varied among different challenging situations. The students were able to identify and solve the cognitive learning challenges in particular. In contrast, motivational and emotional learning challenges were not recognized and solved that often. It is concluded that ignoring the challenges that students are experiencing can affect their collaboration in many ways such as creating a general work atmosphere, causing unequal participation or lower satisfaction with group learning.
Source: Learning, Culture and Social Interaction - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research