Speaker
Description
In order to give our students the opportunity to learn collaboratively in our introductory physics labs, we developed a series of hour-long collaborative activities that students engaged with via Zoom using the IOLab lesson player. We envisioned and developed the activities to revolve around four student roles (experimentalist, theorist, archivist, and manager) to help students share their work equally. By connecting student interviews with reports from 245 students who were randomly assigned to groups of 4 in each of 11 weeks for our activities, we find that roles helped to improve the sharing of collaborative work online. However, there are two caveats. First, the students did not allocate the roles equally. Second, write-ups from the groups with an isolated minority student (i.e., groups with one woman and three men) were significantly less than groups of any other configuration. These findings provide quantitative evidence to support longstanding advice that instructors should avoid forming groups with isolated minority students in physics.
