Presenter: Preston Carroll
Authors: Preston Carroll, Mackenzie Norman
Faculty Advisor: Britt Wyatt
Institution: Utah Valley University
Working in groups is critical for effective and active learning in undergraduate science classrooms (Theobald et al., 2017). In addition to enhancing learning, group work promotes collaboration and exposes students to a greater diversity of thinking. Students tend to do better in their undergraduate courses when they can teach and interact with other classmates through active learning. However, group work may also have a negative impact on student success. If the quality of the conversation is low or the environment of the group is inequitable, group work can function to hinder student learning. The role that gender plays in facilitating group conversations and environment has not been thoroughly explored in the literature. Therefore,additionalresearch on gender dynamics in groups will help promote positive and impactful group collaborations for student success. Our researchinvolvesanalyzingaudio and video data of students working and groups to explore howgender, ethnicity, course grades, and social interactions (i.e.talking onversusoff task, posture, distractions, etc.) correlate with productive group work.Ourpreliminaryanalysis suggests thata higher ratio of women in a groupispredictive of certain group behaviors such as being more on task and promoting more conversations.Inaddition,men are more likely to start and finish the tasks with little to no time wasted on other interactions.We predict, basedontheinitialanalysis of our data, women will have more total talk turns and a higher percent of off-task talk turns.By understandingwhat the most functional andequitablegroup formations are, we will be able to enable educators to have productive groupwork to better prepare students for the workforce(Theobald et al., 2017).