2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This paper summarizes milestones, lessons learned, and preliminary research findings for an NSF IUSE project awarded in Fall 2021.

Collaborative learning can improve student learning, student persistence, and the classroom
climate. Most of the evidence-based practices for collaborative learning rely on the assumption of face-to-face interactions or asynchronous online activities. In this project, we have developed tools and pedagogies for synchronous computer-supported collaborative learning activities that can be used in online and in-person classes.

Tool development: We have integrated collaborative-learning features to PrairieLearn, which is an open-source online assessment platform that supports mastery learning. We first developed an option for group assessments, where multiple students can share the same work (and consequently the same grade) with real-time synchronization. Currently we are finalizing the development of two additional features: a) the ability to assign team roles within the assessment, where each role can have different access permissions, such as view and edit. The assignment of structured team roles reduces students’ tendency to default into domineering team leaders or passive free-loaders. b) instructor and student dashboards to facilitate collaborative learning activities, providing information about group formation, division of tasks, request for assistance, etc.

Adoption: Our teaching innovations were initially developed to support three undergraduate computer science courses offered at a large public research university. All three courses adopted a flipped classroom format, where students watch pre-recorded videos prior to class, and work on collaborative learning activities during class time. The pedagogies and tools developed for this project have been successfully implemented in online and in-person sections of the three courses. From our knowledge, the tools have been adopted as well by at least 15 other courses in four different institutions using PrairieLearn.

Synchronous versus asynchronous courses: We compared how students worked collaboratively under two different course offerings: synchronous with structured roles and asynchronous without structured roles. Our results indicate that students in the synchronous course have improvement in the performance of submissions by a half to a full letter grade and need one week less of in-class time to finish assessments. Moreover, groups from the synchronous course had more evenly distributed work among members of a team when compared to groups from the asynchronous course.

Sense of belonging: We have conducted pre- and post- surveys that included measures of student’s sense of belonging in relation to their instructors and classmates (whole class). Pre-course surveys indicate women tend to experience a lower sense of belonging compared to their male peers in lower-level courses. Post-course surveys indicate both women and men’s whole class sense of belonging statistically significantly increases, with men and women reporting similar levels of sense of belonging on average after completing our courses using collaborative learning. We additionally ask students about their sense of belonging in relation to their collaborative groups (within group). Our preliminary results indicate students’ within-group sense of belonging is statistically significantly higher than their whole class sense of belonging.