The relationship between students' attitudes towards collaboration in groups and students' learning

The research examined the relationship between students' attitudes towards collaboration in groups, faculty/student interaction, and faculty feedback and students' learning in a graduate teacher education program. In addition, the study took into consideration factors in the college classroom which could affect students' learning such as age, gender, ethnicity, extent of prior experience with collaboration, and grade point average. The theoretical framework for this study is the "Theory of Collaboration for Teachers and Librarians" (Montiel-Overall, 2005). The theory contends that certain conditions and environmental factors are necessary for successful collaboration. It also purports that there is a relationship between and among characteristics of successful collaboration and that student achievement is affected by effective collaboration. The study population consisted of graduate students in a teacher education program. The Student Collaboration and Learning Questionnaire" was used to collect the data. It was comprised of "Students' Attitudes toward Group Environments" which measures the attitudes of students towards group environments, "Faculty Learning Communities: Student Learning Survey" which measures students' learning, and "The Student Learning Survey" which measured faculty/student interaction, and faculty feedback. In order to explore the topic further, an open ended item was added to the questionnaire to allow the respondents to express their sentiments about the small group collaboration in their graduate work and its application to their workplaces. Descriptive statistics, bivariate analyses, multivariate analyses, ANOVA tests, t tests, and multiple linear regressions were performed on the data to assess the information. The study concluded that there was a statistically significant relationship between students' learning and the experience with collaboration prior to this class (p = 0.0029 and faculty feedback ( p = <.0001). There was also a statistically significant relationship between students' learning and their experience with collaboration prior to this class (p = 0.0181) and faculty/student interaction (p = 0.0038) when measured by the self reported grade. The results were statistically significant (alpha < .05) in both cases. There was no significant relationship between students' attitudes towards collaboration in groups and learning. The Theory of Collaboration contends that there are certain conditions and environmental factors which are necessary for successful collaboration. Among the three factors---students' attitudes towards collaboration in groups, faculty/student interaction, and faculty feedback---students' attitudes towards collaboration in groups had no significant relationship with students' learning while faculty/student interaction and faculty feedback had the most significant relationship with students' learning.