Learning Through Group Work in the College Classroom: Evaluating the Evidence from an Instructional Goal Perspective

Early conceptions of group work seemed easy to understand and intuitively appealing to faculty as well as relatively simple to implement. As use in the classroom and research on the process continued, ideas about learning from group work became more and more complex. In this chapter, we describe the research on instructional innovations related to group work, not from the perspective of their underlying theory, but organized by the goals that instructors are trying to reach. In particular, we structure this chapter around some fairly universal instructional goals for the postsecondary classroom: knowledge acquisition, knowledge application, knowledge creation, and disciplinary discourse acquisition.

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