INVESTIGATING THE INFLUENCE OF INDIVIDUAL PREPARATION ON PERFORMANCE IN COLLABORATIVE LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS

Abstract

Collaborative learning of students facilitates efficient and meaningful information processing. Individual learning or solo learning is equally valuable it has the potential to amplify the benefits of collaborative learning. However, previous research has not clearly demonstrated how this type of preparation contributes to learning or how it differs from simply studying alone. Moreover, most of those studies focused on short-term outcomes and were limited to fields like history or literature, rather than areas like engineering or technical education. The study has two experiments that explored the direct and delayed effects of individual preparation before collaboration, as a way to address those gaps. In the first experiment, 79 undergraduate participants participated in groups that either, learned individually, worked collaboratively with no preparation, or made both an individual and a collaborative contribution. The participants involved in individual preparation and collaborating had better performances than the other groups, both immediate and delayed exams. The second experiment involved 101 participants studying without the benefit of any prior teaching, and used real teaching materials from technical education. Again participants' performance was examined, in both the short- and long-terms and was found that the participants who prepared individually first and then collaboratively, outperformed the other groups, both in the short- and longer-term assessments. Overall, the results illustrate that individual learning prior to collaboration makes collaborative learning more effective and can be considered in other methods of teaching, especially in engineering professional education context.