Instructor perceptions and reported practices around informal peer collaboration on homework among engineering students
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
While team learning within engineering classrooms has been studied, minimal work has been done examining out-of-classroom collaboration to complete individual deliverables. However, such informal peer collaboration (IPC) is common among engineering undergraduates, and some evidence exists that low levels of IPC are associated with poorer learning outcomes. We aimed to explore beliefs, perceptions and actions toward IPC among engineering science instructors. We used a descriptive phenomenological approach to explore the instructors’ experiences of IPC. Data from semi-structured interviews was analysed using inductive thematic analysis. Instructors identified positive (e.g. gaining confidence) and negative (e.g. overconfidence) outcomes of IPC. They believed that students used IPC for a range of needs and identified factors (e.g. language spoken) influencing IPC groupings. Most instructors only defined academic misconduct in syllabi, despite using implicit strategies (e.g. withholding solutions) to promote/inhibit IPC. Specific IPC policies were rarely connected to instructors’ understanding of student motivations. Instructors view IPC as unavoidable and recognise that IPC may meet student needs while increasing or bypassing learning. Despite both using IPC as students and observing students now, instructors showed limited understanding of who participates. IPC may be an opportunity to increase learning among students; further research on barriers and pedagogy is warranted.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it