Building learning culture through effective uses of group work

The literature on group work indicates pros and cons to its use in the classroom. By looking at mechanisms of group failure and success and then linking these to concrete practices, we highlight some important boundary conditions involving goal difficulty, how goals are set and feedback, which practitioners may find helpful to know about before building group work into the learning culture of their classrooms. In a review, Nokes-Malach et al. (2015) highlight how several mechanisms underpin collaborative work, and describe how these mechanisms can determine group-work success or failure. They define collaboration as meaning active engagement and interaction among group members to achieve a common goal, and this will serve as our definition Nokes-Malach et al. (2015) go on to review numerous mechanisms of group failure and success, divided into cognitive and social mechanisms. On the cognitive failure side, we can see the cognitive costs of coordinating and collaborating. Every te