Abstract:

Achieving collaboration among students within the framework of the educational reality of the current university environment, with the methodologies that exist today, is very complicated because students tend to break the barriers of interdependence between them to individualize their actions in achieving a common goal (which may be, for example, the realization of a group work). The development of new methodologies based on collaborative environments is a very complicated task that requires a lot of attention in current teaching areas and especially in the university. This paper presents a case study in which university students have been subjected to forced environments of collaboration for the development of monographic works in a subject of the Degree in Chemistry of the University of Alicante. The forced collaboration environments were designed parallel to the forced collaboration experiments carried out on great apes by researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology, in the German city of Leibzig, with whom the author is currently working closely. These collaborative environments consisted of a series of 5 monographic works in pairs in which the participation of each of the students was followed by means of an interactive supervision platform. In addition, the grading of the work, as well as its oral presentation to classmates, fell only on one student who was decided by raffle, in order to increase participation in a collective effort not necessarily compensated individually. The success rate was defined as the percentage of times that the monographic works obtained a grade higher than 4 points out of 10. The results obtained in this study were evaluated and compared with the results of a classic methodology of supposed collaboration between students for the accomplishment of works in pairs. The results in both methodologies are very different and it can be verified that the methodology of forced collaboration environment offers results of much greater success than the conventional one. It is also concluded that there is a significant improvement in learning outcomes with this new methodology and that students express a very favorable opinion towards these new forms of forced collaboration.

Keywords:

Forced collaboration, teaching methodology, university teaching.