Student satisfaction with groupwork in undergraduate computer science : do things get better? Helen Drury, Judy Kay and Warren Losberg Learning Centre, School of Information Technologies and Yooroang Garang: The School of Indigenous Health StudiesUniversity of Sydney, AUSTRALIA, 2006 hdrury@mail.usyd.edu.au, judy@it.usyd.edu.au , W.Losberg@cchs.usyd.edu.au Abstract Groupwork has a large and important role in computer science courses. Moreover, groupwork skills are among the most important generic attributes students should develop during their studies as preparation for the world of work (Candy, Crebert and O'Leary, 1994, Dearing, 1997). At the same time, all who have been involved in teaching that involves groupwork will be aware that it brings challenges. It is important to support student learning of group skills, to develop instruments for evaluating this aspect of teaching and to measure student development in groupwork skill as well as student perceptions of their groupwork experiences. This paper reports on a cross sectional evaluation of student perceptions of groupwork. It is based upon both group interviews and a questionnaire. An important contribution of this work is the questionnaire which could be readily used in quality assurance elsewhere. Another contribution derives from the results of our study. They give useful insight into student perceptions across cross sectional cohorts and according to academic ability. We also report on ways that this study has helped us define strategies to improve the development of student skills in groupwork. Keywords: groupwork, cross sectional study, quality assurance, first year experience. 1 Introduction It is now widely accepted that groupwork skills are an important generic outcome for all students on graduation. This is particularly so in the area of computer science where the working environment of graduates is predominantly group or team based (Kidder, 1981). Initially, project work involving groupwork has been typical in the later years of computer science degrees when students have already acquired and applied technical knowledge (Farkas, 1988, Dietrich and Urban, 1996) and need to be oriented towards the world of work (Lowe, 2000, Chamillard and Braun, 2002). Core courses or foundation courses have tended to be taught in more traditional ways, especially courses which Copyright 2002, Australian Computer Society, Inc. This paper appeared at the Australasian Computing Education Conference (ACE2003), Adelaide, Australia. Conferences in Research and Practice in Information Technology, Vol. 20. Tony Greening and Raymond Lister, Eds. Reproduction for academic, not-for profit purposes provided this text is included. have large first year student intakes (Wills, Finkel, Gennert and Ward,1994). There has been increasing recognition of the need to introduce groupwork components early in the undergraduate years to enhance both the educational and social experience of students new to the university context (Wills, Finkel, Gennert and Ward,1994, Sabin and Sabin, 1994, Daigle, Doran and Pardue, 1996) and in this way to improve retention rates (Chase and Okie, 2000). Groupwork has been a component of the foundation course in computer science at Sydney University since the mid 90s when groupwork was introduced within an adapted Problem-based learning framework (Barg, Fekete, Greening, Hollands, Kay, Kingston and Crawford, 2000). There were several motivations for introducing groupwork in the foundation year. One of the most important was to improve the first year experience, especially the isolation felt by many students at the very beginning of their studies. Another important goal for groupwork was that students would be able to tackle larger tasks and these would demand the power of an object-oriented programming paradigm. We also felt that the explicit teaching of groupwork skills meshed well with the philosophy of Problem-based learning, where time is taken to teach a range of broad problem solving skills. One of these is to learn to work effectively within a group (Boud and Felleti, 1991) There is an extensive literature on the benefits and challenges of groupwork in education. In general, benefits have been reported in student learning and performance as well as in the development of higher level cognitive skills if groupwork encourages students to engage more deeply and actively with and reflect more on what and how they are learning. In addition, non cognitive benefits such as developments in interpersonal and social skills, as well as student self-esteem and self- motivation in learning have been reported (Slavin, 1992, Johnson and Johnson, 1992, Thorley and Gregory, 1994). However, although studies generally report that student achievement is enhanced through groupwork and particularly for low achievers, females and minority groups, the extent to which less able or passive students benefit has also been questioned (Webb, 1992, Thorley and Gregory, 1994). In addition, the need for group learning methods to incorporate group goals and individual accountability has been emphasised if effective learning is to occur (Slavin, 1990). The challenges of groupwork in terms of curriculum design, assessment and staff training are well known as well as issues of the