Division of Biological Sciences, University of Missouri, Columbia, Missouri, United States of America.
School of Education, Fairleigh Dickinson University, Teaneck, New Jersey, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2024 Sep 24;19(9):e0310918. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0310918. eCollection 2024.
Small group work has been shown to improve students' achievement, learning, engagement, and attitudes toward science. Previous studies that focused on different methods of group formation and their possible impacts mainly focused on measures of students' academic ability, such as GPA, SAT scores, and previous familiarity with course content. However little attention has been given to other characteristics such as students' social demographic identities in research about group formation and students' experiences. Here, we studied the criteria students use to form lab groups, examined how the degree of demographic isolation varies between student-selected and randomly-formed groups, and tested whether demographic isolation is associated with group work attitudes. We used a pre-post survey research design to examine students' responses in a large-enrollment biology laboratory course. Descriptive analyses showed that "students sitting next to me" (57%) followed by the combination of "students sitting next to me" and "friends" (22%) were the two most common criteria students reported that they considered when forming research groups. Notably, over 80 percent of students reported forming groups with those who sat nearby. We studied instances where students were isolated by being the only members of a historically marginalized population in their lab groups. The prevalence of demographic isolation in student-selected groups was found to be lower than in the simulated randomly assigned groups. We also used multilevel linear regression to examine whether being an isolated student was associated with attitudes about group work, yielding no consistent statistically significant effects. This study contributes to growing knowledge about the relationship between students' demographic isolation in groups and group work attitudes.
小组合作已被证明可以提高学生的成绩、学习效果、参与度和对科学的态度。以前的研究主要集中在小组形成的不同方法及其可能的影响上，主要关注学生的学业能力衡量标准，如 GPA、SAT 分数和对课程内容的先前熟悉程度。然而，在小组形成和学生体验方面，学生的社会人口特征等其他特征在研究中几乎没有得到关注。在这里，我们研究了学生形成实验小组所使用的标准，考察了学生选择的小组和随机形成的小组之间在人口隔离程度上的差异，以及人口隔离是否与小组工作态度有关。我们使用了预-后测调查研究设计来检验生物学大课上学生的反应。描述性分析表明，“坐在我旁边的学生”（57%）是学生报告在形成研究小组时最常考虑的两个标准之一，其次是“坐在我旁边的学生”和“朋友”的组合（22%）。值得注意的是，超过 80%的学生报告说与附近的人组成了小组。我们研究了学生在实验小组中因为是唯一的少数族裔成员而被孤立的情况。在学生选择的小组中，人口隔离的发生率低于模拟随机分配的小组。我们还使用多层线性回归来检验孤立的学生是否与小组工作态度有关，结果没有一致的显著影响。这项研究有助于增加对小组中学生的人口隔离与小组工作态度之间关系的了解。
