An Effective Method for Incentivizing Groups Implemented in a Collaborative Problem-based Learning System to Enhance Positive Peer Interaction and Learning Performance

Abstract

Many studies have verified that collaborative problem-based learning (CPBL) is an increasingly popular educational paradigm that has great potential to cultivate learners’ collaborative learning and problem-solving abilities. The effective promotion of both positive interactions among group members and group accountability is a critical issue in CPBL. This work therefore proposes a group incentive mechanism (GIM) that is based on several important factors that influence peers’ interactions and group accountability in collaborative learning to improve learning performance, interactive relationships, group efficacy, and the cohesiveness of groups of learners in a CPBL system. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed GIM, 48 Grade 4 students were recruited from an elementary school in Taoyuan City, Taiwan, to participate in an instruction experiment. The quasi-experimental design was used to evaluate differences in learning performance, interaction, group efficacy, and group cohesiveness between the experimental group of learners with the proposed GIM and a control group of learners with the individual incentive mechanism (IIM) while using the CPBL system to solve a target problem collaboratively. Analytical results reveal that although the control group of learners with the IIM exhibited greater social interactions than the experimental group of learners with the proposed GIM, the experimental group exhibited better learning performance, group efficacy, and positive interactive relationships than the control group. The CPBL system with novel GIM supports a more effective form of CPBL.