Examining Relationships of Collegiate Experiences, Gender, and Academic Area with Undergraduate Students' Collaborative Learning Skills

Abstract

Collaborative learning skills are one of the essential learning outcomes for a college education in 21st century. College students are expected to possess the ability to collaborate with others in order to succeed in their career after graduating from college. However, the effects of collegiate experiences on collaborative learning for different gender and academic areas are almost unexplored. In addition, researchers highlight the need for more research on interaction effects to explore whether different types of students respond differently to various collegiate experiences. The researcher examined the relationship of student-student interactions and student-faculty interactions with graduating seniors' perceived collaborative learning skills. Furthermore, the researcher explored whether this relationship was moderated by students' gender, academic area, and retrospective perception of their collaborative learning skills. Social-cognitive learning theory and Astin's involvement theory were used as conceptual frameworks to guide this study. Astin's input-environment-output college impact model served as a theoretical guide. Using an institutional cross-sectional data set, multiple regression analysis was utilized to examine these relationships. According to the results, the relationship between student-student interactions and graduating seniors' perceived collaborative learning skills was positive after controlling for the other independent variables in the study. Further results revealed that the relationship of student-student interactions and student-faculty interactions with the outcome variable was moderated by students' gender, academic area, and retrospective perception of their collaborative learning skill. The relationship between student-faculty interactions and the outcome variable was significantly weaker for male students, whereas the relationship between student-student interactions and the outcome variable was weaker for female student. The relationship between student-faculty interactions and the outcome variable was weaker for students in hard pure academic areas when compared to students in soft applied academic areas, while the opposite was observed for the relationship between student-student interactions and the outcome variable. The findings of the present study can be used to shape students' interactions with faculty and their peers with the awareness that these impact different types of students in different ways.