How Do Students Learn Together?

Licentiate thesis, 2023

Recent years have seen a shift in engineering education as universities seek to produce engineers capable of dealing with the complex challenges facing society. When facing these challenges, engineers will not only need to rely on technical knowledge and skills but will also be expected to collaborate with others from different fields and backgrounds. Engineers will also need to be aware of the impacts their solutions will have on society and in terms of sustainability. In response, an increasing number of universities are turning to programs based on project-based learning, where groups of students from different disciplines work on complex real-world problems.
Existing research tends to view such programs through the lens of learning outcomes and benefits rather than through the students’ experiences and their process of learning. There is a lack of studies that address the social aspects of project-based learning, in particular how groups engage in the social regulation of learning over the length of a project in interdisciplinary groups. This thesis aims to address these gaps in the research by examining collaborative learning and the regulation of learning in student groups taking part in project-based interdisciplinary groupwork at Chalmers University of Technology.
Two papers are incorporated within this thesis. The first paper analyses reflective writings by students to examine the challenges groups faced when taking part in undergraduate research and the coping strategies they employed in response. This revealed the actions and processes the groups engaged in during collaborative learning. The second paper uses qualitative interviews with students to investigate how groups regulate their learning as a group in interdisciplinary, project-based courses. The findings identify the different kinds of social regulation of learning employed by the student groups during the different phases of the project and factors that affected their regulation. When looked at together, the papers show the impact that desirable challenges, uncertainty, autonomy, and group composition have on both collaborative learning and social regulation of learning.
The thesis concludes with a discussion of how groups’ learning, and regulation of learning can benefit from scaffolding and the introduction of suitable coping strategies while maintaining the groups’ autonomy.