Short Collaboration Tasks in Higher Education: Is Putting Yourself in Another’s Shoes Essential for Joint Knowledge Building?

Abstract

In Higher Education, students are often grouped together for short collaborative assignments. The question is how to optimally group students in order to achieve the potential rewards of such collaboration. In this study, the relation between the ability to take each other’s perspective, familiarity, experienced relatedness, and quality of collaboration was investigated. Thirty-three dyads of undergraduate students collaborated on a short genetics assignment. They first read information individually and then had to combine their knowledge to solve the task. By means of questionnaires, participants’ prior knowledge, perspective taking ability, familiarity, and relatedness to collaborative partner were measured. Only dyads’ average prior knowledge predicted the score on the group assignment. Implications for dyad grouping and further research are discussed.