Thanks to the COM352 students for contributing a bunch of new pages! I'll be moving these pages into the main area of the wiki soon.
Class:COM352 - Group Dynamics - Spring 2008/Informed Consent
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update, Week 12
Our group has yet to identify a product, or even if there should be one. We have discussed the possible findings that could be extracted from our class time regarding group dynamics. We have also discussed what we may have liked to study from the start knowing what we know now. Lastly, we discussed some ways in which we might evaluate Steph's evolution in relation to our group's dynamic.
What might we find? We all can identify the evolution of the relative comfort level in the class. From day one, working together as a group has been a progressively easier undertaking. We have moved through a couple stages of group dynamics and have reached a point where tasks can be handled more efficiently as a result. Specifically, the storming session we went through tore down some communication barriers that likely prohibited the group from operating at full potential. We, the members of the informed consent group, feel that a study in how class members rank each other in the peer evaluations might uncover a correlation between ratings (quantitatively) and comfort level (qualitatively).
What would we do if we could do it again? Having been through the experience of Class a la Steph, we suggest that it may have been interesting to look at group member satisfaction in relation to time in class. How satisfied (could also be measured as optimism) were group members after the first day of class? How about after getting used to Steph's style of instruction? After the storming session? How about now, with the semester almost over and little done on the wiki?
What's the story with Steph? Steph's brand of instruction was new to almost all of us. As we learned to work with her, she inescapably changed in some way to work with us. What were those changes? How much did the group dynamic influence those changes? Have we (the class) and Steph (the instructor) reached a healthy working relationship?
Comm352user1 14:53, 28 April 2008 (EDT)
resources
Steph's analysis of class 6 (the storm)
Can we retrieve some of the peer rating data from Steph?
Formal Consent Form
We agreed to a framework for the study in a meeting on Thursday, May 1. Here is the actual form (to be distributed during Week 13).
Team "Standard"
Members of the Informed Consent/Study Team completed the designed worksheet before the rest of the class in order to make some predictions.
One question (that began to lead us to the particular design of the worksheet, instead of simple questionnaire of ratings as was originally considered) involves whether or not students evaluations of each other became more or less positive over time, i.e., would students decline giving constructive feedback because of knowing each other better, or would knowing each other establish more comfort for saying something about the little things one notices that another could improve upon?
Ideally, it would have been nice to know what student's satisfaction was with the class at the beginning, in the middle, and now at the end, with "satisfaction" referring to students' sense of learning and accomplishment. Since the records exist in the course wiki, the worksheet hopes to serve as an aid to memory, so that we can reconstruct changes in satisfaction over time.
Finally, questions about how the authority relations have shifted led us to devise a process in which student feedback on the dimension of Steph's role as teacher/grader (and their own confidence in each other's perceptions and talents) could be handled by the student team so that everyone could feel more confident in being honest about the changes they've perceived in Steph and/or in their own - and each other's - orientations to the role of a teacher as authority.
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