Mary Beth and Stephanie,

Thank you all for sharing your thoughts on how to integrate successful group work into the classroom! 

I enjoyed the creative sub-heading titles, as well as the emphasis on logistical aspects of group work. I loved the reference to Vygostky too. The article was well organized and flowed nicely from topic to topic in a logical manner.

I have a few bits of feedback.

I would tend to disagree with the notion presented in the first line of the abstract that group work strikes fear and loathing. I think this sentiment is common in the online classroom, but not so common in traditional classrooms. An in-text citation to support this claim would be ideal too.

CLC groups are also a GCU specific term, so I would remove it from the abstract and present the term with a definition in the body of the text if necessary.

What would it look like if a teacher appointed leadership roles and other supporting roles to students (a la Kagan's cooperative grouping)? I'm not saying this would work well every time, but it's worth considering.

I would love reference to examples of actual assignments in classrooms that worked well. They need not be your classes and your students, but specific assignments and student feedback supporting the use of group work or the strategies your propose would be helpful. 

Ideally, there would be reference in the conclusion to "community" since that's a strong theoretical concept addressed early in the manuscript, which would allow it to come full circle. 

Include page numbers with in-text citations for direct quotations. 

Review sub-heading expectations, specifically capitalization rules, for APA Style. 

There are some comma errors (e.g. misplaced commas resulting in a splice and missing commas after introductory phrases) that you would want to tend to before further publication. 

Thank you all for sharing your fantastic work with all of us! 

Best,

Meredith 

Congratulations Mary and Stephanie on preparing an excellent piece of work. Nice job clearly stating the direction of the research and what you all were seeking to convey in your article. It was great to see that much of your work is supported by prior research.

Your comment to assign low-engagement members to the same group was an eye opener for me. My assumption is that the vast majority of low-engagement members will become more productive when there is no savior in the group to absorb their responsibilities. To the contrary, I have adopted a practice of assigning an evenly distribution of students to each group based on my early assessment of the student’s abilities. However, based on your comment, I now understand the limitations of this approach as it will be more prone to foster negative group conflict due to the dispersion of non-performing in each group students. Therefore, it would be interesting to measure how clusters of groups with lower engagement scores perform when working together.

From my observation, some faculty and students regard group work as a nuisance.  I believe that students are more terrified of public speaking as opposed to completing group work. In addition, students working in cohorts in both online and ground courses may enjoy the group experience more. Thus gaining a better understanding of how students and faculty feel about group work is another area where additional research may be useful.  Again, great work and I enjoyed reading your article.

Barry Adkins