The role of cultural background and team divisions in developing social learning relations in the classroom

A common assumption is that students prefer to work together with students from similar cultural backgrounds. In a group work context, students from different cultural backgrounds are “forced” to work together. This might lead to stress and anxiety but at the same time may allow students to learn from different perspectives. The prime goal of this article is to understand how international and home students from different cultural backgrounds build learning and work relationships with other students in and outside their classroom using an innovative quantitative method of Social Network Analysis in a pre-post test manner. In Study 1, 50 Spanish and 7 Erasmus economics students worked in self-selected teams. In Study 2, 69 primarily international students in a postgraduate management program in the United Kingdom worked in randomized teams. The results indicate that in Study 1 learning ties after 14 weeks were significantly predicted by the initial team division and friendship ties. The seven international students integrated well. In Study 2, learning ties after 14 weeks were primarily predicted by the team division, followed by initial friendship ties and conational friendships. Although international students developed strong (multinationality) team learning relationships, international students also kept strong links with students with the same cultural background. As the initial team division had an 8 times stronger effect on learning ties than cultural backgrounds, these results indicate that the instructional design of team work has a strong influence on how international and home students work and learn together

Making the most of “external” group members in blended and online environments

Although the importance of boundary-spanning in blended and online learning is widely acknowledged, most educational research has ignored whether and how students learn from others outside their assigned group. One potential approach for understanding cross-boundary knowledge sharing is Social Network Analysis (SNA). In this article, we apply four network metrics to unpack how students developed intra- and inter-group learning links, using two exemplary blended case-studies in Spain and the UK. Our results indicate that SNA based upon questionnaires can provide researchers some useful indicators for a more fine-grained analysis how students develop these inter- and intra-group learning links, and which cross-boundary links are particularly important for learning performance. The mixed findings between the two case-studies suggest the relevance of pre-existing conditions and learning design. SNA metrics can provide useful information for qualitative follow-up methods, and future interventions using learning analytics approaches