University students’ perceptions on peers’ contributions in group work: the challenges and strategies

Abstract

At universities, group work is widely used as a teaching method to assist instructors in realising learning objectives. It has been demonstrated that high-quality collaboration between group members enables students to obtain higher individual achievement compared to students working alone. Although much research has supported the value of group work, some challenges, which have existed for a long time, reduce the effectiveness of group work. One challenge is that some group members may not fully engage in, or contribute to group work. Researchers and practitioners have consistently explored the challenges in group work; they have worked on a number of strategies to increase every group member's motivation to contribute by eliminating the negative effects such as free riding, social loafing, and the ‘sucker effect’. However, the applied strategies are not always effective and, therefore, the challenge of reduced motivation of group members is still influencing a group’s performance. As group work becomes even more important in current higher education, it is necessary to explore students’ experiences of group members’ contributions in the higher education context and to understand the strategies used to increase students’ motivation towards group work. This research examines students’ perceptions on two main areas of group work: 1) Students’ experiences of group members’ contributions; and 2) the strategies used to increase group members’ motivation in group work. The research was conducted with postgraduate students studying in the same unit at a university in Australia. Twenty-eight students in the unit were recruited to participate in an individual interview, while another sixty students were recruited to fill out a questionnaire. Thematic analysis was used to categorise and analyse the interview data. The related themes were selected in order to address the research questions. Frequency analysis was used to process the quantitative data. The questionnaire items were designed based on the interview questions. The questionnaire aims to validate the responses of the interviews. This is qualitative-dominant mixed methods research. It used interviews as the main approach for qualitative data collection with an addition of quantitative data collected via a survey approach. The research has two important findings. First, social loafing and free riding have extensively taken place in students’ group work at the research site. Social loafing and free riding have reduced the benefits of students’ group work. From my data as well as the review of the literature universities and students at this stage have not found general effective solutions. Indeed, the second findings suggests that it is now necessary more than ever for educational institutions to take actions to curb social loafing and free riding. Educational technologies are capable of reducing social loafing and free riding. Many participants of my study believe that making all students’ contributions visible or evaluable has benefits. Future research should focus on investigating assessment schemes for collaborative learning. In addition, it should also explore how to use computers to reduce instructors’ workload when assessing group members’ individual contributions. CSCL research could focus on how to enable computer to automatically assess individual contributions in group work without the instructors having to physically participate in the evaluation process.