Research Plan
This small scale research was conducted within 5 weeks.
Method, Sample and Data collection
An online questionnaire was used to collect quantitative and qualitative data. We pilot-tested the initial questionnaire, to clarify items and eliminate redundancies.
Questionnaires were distributed via Changing education whatsApp group and email. Participants were assured that their participation was anonymous and voluntary.
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The questionnaire contained three parts:
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Participants' information and groupwork experiences
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Groupwork features, preference, and students’ engagement items consisted of 22 Likert scale survey questions, based on "Designing Groupwork" (Cohen & Lotan, 2014) and Higher education student engagement scale (HESES) (Zhoc et al., 2018).
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Two optional open-ended questions, about why participants prefer groupwork or individual work and any other thoughts they want to share.
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Mixed methods were used to analyze the data.
Qualitative method was applied to summarize open-ended questions. Quantitative method was used to deal with students' information and scale items. We used SPSS to calculate mean, standard deviation, run correlation between variables and generated histogram.
31 students participated in this study, all of them were master’s degree program students.
Participants
Most of the participants(90.3%) were changing education students, 80.1% were first year students, and 19.4% were second year students.