Effects of the group leadership promotion approach on students’ higher order thinking awareness and online interactive behavioral patterns in a blended learning environment

ABSTRACT

The present study aims to incorporate a group leadership promotion approach into collaborative learning tasks in the hope of developing students’ creativity, problem-solving, and critical thinking. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, we recruited 59 cross-professional students from a university in northern Taiwan, and divided them into an experimental group (6 sub-groups) and a control group (6 sub-groups). The experimental group students learned with the group leadership promotion approach, while the control group learned with conventional blended learning approach. The results show that the students could better develop their creativity, problem-solving, critical thinking, and learning achievement via the group leadership promotion approach. Lastly, sequential analysis of their behaviors indicated that students’ interaction with group leadership in online collaborative learning can promote many more creative ideas and comments, enhance reaching a consensus and making conclusions, and finally, facilitate completion of the group learning tasks.

KEYWORDS:

• Group leadership
• blended learning
• learning analytics
• collaborative learning
• online behavioral patterns

Acknowledgements

This study is supported in part by the Ministry of Science and Technology of the Republic of China under contract numbers MOST 106-2511-S-011-005-MY3 and MOST 106-2511-S-152-012-MY3.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Ms. Shu-Chen Cheng is a PhD student at the Graduate Institute of Applied Science and Technology, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology. Her research interests include mobile learning and blended learning.

Dr. Gwo-Jen Hwang is a chair professor at the Graduate Institute of Digital Learning and Education, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology. His research interests include mobile learning, digital game-based learning, flipped classroom and AI in education.

Dr. Chiu-Lin Lai is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Education, National Taipei University of Education, Taiwan. Her research interests include mobile learning, flipped learning, learning analytics and digital game-based learning.

ORCID

Gwo-Jen Hwang http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5155-276X