Designing Collaborative Learning Activities in a Physics Course

Paper in proceeding, 2017

The short paper describes and evaluates a collaborative learning activity that was implemented in four physics classes in different university programs. The activity consisted of two assignments for groups of four to seven, where students find a common set of solutions to a given number of problems. After a short introduction of collaborative learning and the related literature, we present the setup of the activity and particularly address some of the pitfalls of group work, how we tried to overcome them and our experience gained. Based on student passing rates, the course evaluations and our own observations we conclude that the group assignment provided a powerful learning experience with positive effects on the student performance, attitudes and interpersonal relationships.