Pedagogy.

Collaboration with Dr. Parisa Jazbi: Group work is one of the most widely used and deeply researched teaching approaches in the college classroom. It promotes students’ collaboration to achieve shared learning goals and has also been shown to increase student achievement, persistence, and attitudes toward science. Although this method has been used in many disciplines, there is evidence of disciplinary variation in students’ learning approaches. This work seeks to address the following question: Do students in a Psychology class have the same perception of learning compared to students in a Biology class when group work teaching pedagogy is used?

A mixed-methods approach was utilized. In addition to completing self-reports to assess students’ perceptions, qualitative data was collected to investigate linguistic content. Taken together, our results indicate that group work is advantageous irrespective of discipline. More than 70% of pupils in both Biology and Psychology classes agreed that they benefited from group work in understanding basic principles, developing skills in problem-solving and communication, taking control of their learning, etc. Despite these similarities, our qualitative (LIWC) findings suggest that the two disciplines may differ for several key variables, including authenticity (e.g., perceived honesty, genuineness) and cognitive processing (i.e., using words such as “think” or “know”). This manuscript is currently under review (Jazbi & Lozano, submitted).