A Team-Oriented Approach to Learning:An Effort to Improve Student Retention and Performance

摘要

Most educators have experienced the difficulty of motivating students in a course they must take to fulfill some general educationrequirement. Students in such courses are often relatively new to the university environment and, as a consequence, are prone to dropout or fail at a significantly higher rate than students in upper-division and/or major courses. This paper reports the results of a studyon a “team-oriented approach to learning” [1] conducted in an introductory course in computer information systems. Based on agrowing body of research indicating that team-oriented activities may make students feel more involved in their coursework, promotediscussion among students that reinforces the concepts being taught, and even improve student retention and performance, theinstructors in this course developed a wide range of team-oriented activities that were integrated into nearly all phases of the course.While students in the course were still required to complete a number of individual activities, regular group quizzes, in-class groupsoftware projects and other group activities were scheduled at least once per week throughout the term. Frequent, prompt feedbackwas provided on both individual and group activities. To assess the success of this teaching approach, objective student retention andperformance measures are compared with data from two terms in which the team-oriented approach to learning was not used in thecourse. Qualitative assessments of the impact of the team-oriented approach to learning are also reported.