Do Young People Really Know How to Collaborate for Common Success? Study on Undergraduate Students’ Perception of Collaborative Work in a Spanish University

This paper studies undergraduate student attitudes towards team-based projects, connecting those attitudes to challenges and overall perception of this work. This study was conducted with 220 students in the context of three subjects taught at a Spanish University, that included collaborative projec...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Teaching and learning inquiry 2022-05, Vol.10
Main Authors: Alexeeva-Alexeev, Inna, Vidal-Mazon, Juan Luis, Brito-Ballester, Julién, Ruiz-Salces, Roberto, Gracia-Villar, Monica, Mazas-Pérez-Oleaga, Cristina
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Active Learning
Age Differences
Collaborative work
Cooperative Learning
educational research
Foreign Countries
Gender Differences
higher education
Intellectual Disciplines
Interdisciplinary Approach
interdisciplinary teams
Rasch model
Skill Development
Student Attitudes
Student Projects
Undergraduate Students
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Summary:This paper studies undergraduate student attitudes towards team-based projects, connecting those attitudes to challenges and overall perception of this work. This study was conducted with 220 students in the context of three subjects taught at a Spanish University, that included collaborative projects as mandatory assignments to be developed over the course of the subject. The instrument was a Likert scale-based questionnaire. As a methodology, the Rasch model was used, making it possible to apply indirect measuring of students’ development level of various skills. The findings point to the difficulty in solving specific communication needs and managing students’ involvement and commitment to the project. The results obtained through Differential Item Functioning analysis (DIF) show that gender, year of study, students’ age, academic degrees, and the context of curricular subjects influence significantly the acquisition of skills related to collaborative work, facilitating or hindering their development among university students. These results have practical implications for the design of collaborative projects within higher education academic programs. They also suggest that the way collaborative work is usually planned is not very effective and should be reconsidered.
ISSN:2167-4779
2167-4787
DOI:10.20343/teachlearninqu.10.16