What is it about?
Group discussions have been shown to improve learning and engagement, but faculty often perceive student resistance to them. This experiment tests if telling students about the usefulness of group discussions improves their attitudes towards them. The findings indicated that students did appear to value group discussions more if they were informed of the value. Students were also asked to share
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Why is it important?
Faculty are often reticent to adopt active learning techniques such as group discussions because they are concerned about student resistance. This article describes a simple technique instructors can use to increase student "buy in" for group discussions. Also, this article presents how group discussions are perceived by students.
Perspectives
As a professor, I became interested in this topic when I was told that it was important to tell students the rationale for pedagogical choices, but didn't see any data indicating that this was actually effective. I have a lot of things I need to communicate to students so I wanted to see if this approach was actually helpful--and it was!
Dr Virginia Clinton
University of North Dakota
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Student attitudes toward group discussions, Active Learning in Higher Education, November 2017, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/1469787417740277.
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