Upper secondary school students with a strong academic self-concept are more likely to complete their studies and thus increase their well-being in the future. Previous research on the big-fish-little-pond-effect (BFLPE) has thoroughly established the negative contrast effect of average group academic achievement on students' academic…

Team projects are a component of many business courses. The objective is to build team skills in addition to learning subject matter. However, instructors often pay less attention to team design and behavior and assume students already have or will learn team skills on their own. The authors examined the effect of providing structure to team work…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to understand the organizational mechanisms by which schools can increase opportunities for student leadership. Design/methodology/approach: A review of the student voice literature conducted in high schools was used to identify organizational mechanisms for enhancing student leadership. Findings: Five…

Maybe you heard the line "managing programmers is like herding cats", and if you consider there is some truth behind this, then you should, perhaps, think how it is to teach people to perform this job. As we know from the research literature, there is no such thing as a consensus about the most suitable teaching method of a software…

The purpose of this study was to investigate elementary students' creating processes and perspectives through composition. Two fourth-grade classes took part in this action research, which consisted of creating four compositions--two with acoustic instruments and two with computer software. For each of the two sound sources, the first composition…

To prepare graduates for today's work environment, they must be immersed in positive (and perhaps negative) small group experiences in their courses, which will in turn provide a basic understanding of how teams form and develop over time. In the fall of 2009, we started exploring how software development teams form and interact in a computer…

In construction industries' projects, working in groups is a normal practice. Group work in a classroom is defined as students working collaboratively in a group so that everyone can participate on a collective task. The results from literature review indicate that group work is more effective method of learning as compared to individual work.…

The overall aim of this study was to assess the diversity of primary school children's physical activity (PA) during outdoor recess. The study was grounded in a mixed method approach, assisting in the identification of multifaceted predictors of children's PA, including insights to social behaviours during break time. Data were obtained from…

One of the methods used most often to assess students' friendships and friendship networks is the reciprocal nomination method. However, an often heard complaint is that this technique produces rather negative outcomes. This study compares the reciprocal nomination method with another method to assess students' friendships and friendship networks:…

Group work is used as a means of learning at all levels of most educational systems. However, teachers often use group work without considering its "pros and cons." Such a mode of non-reflected application may sometimes end up in positive experiences and learning, but the likelihood is that the outcome will be the opposite. The aim of…

This research study examined student perceptions of group experiences in the classroom. The author used cooperative learning and team-based learning to focus on three characteristics that are critical for the success of groups: structure of activities, relationships of group members, and accountability of group members. Results indicated that…

The purpose of this study was to examine the degree to which academic achievement in U.S. schools could be explained by several indicators of belongingness (i.e., close teacher-student relationships, peer acceptance, school liking, low levels of loneliness in school and positive perceptions of peers) and school engagement. For this study, data…

The purpose of this research was to study the characteristics of the intragroup relations between the middle-status adolescents in a student group and the other status categories. It is assumed that the social and psychological portrait of an open adolescent student group, the character of the orientation and the level of its development, and the…

Previous research suggested that social support, belongingness and mastery goals were related to the quality of cooperative learning (CL). In this in-depth study we explored how to differentiate between four effective CL teams and four ineffective CL teams, in terms of students' goals and perceptions of instructional conditions. Apart from the…

We investigated the effects of gender and group size on perceptions of group variability, using groups of students taking different majors that varied in the proportion of men and women (female-majority, parity, and male-majority). We found that both group size and gender had consistent effects on perceived out-group variability, even when…