Fostering Success Through Connection: The Impact of Collaborative Quizzes on Relationship-Rich Education

Polly Graham, Indiana University Bloomington

J. Wesley Erwin, III, Indiana University Bloomington

Keywords: Pedagogy, Relationship-Rich Education, Engaged Learning

Key Statement: Meaningful teaching and learning should include evidence-based, relationship-rich education tailored to respective contexts.

Background and Relevance

In their 2023 book, Connections Are Everything: A College Student’s Guide to Relationship Education, Leo Lambert, Peter Felten, Isis Artze-Vega, and Oscar Miranda Tapia provide tips to students for creating meaningful connections in college. Their book is a follow-up to Felten and Lambert’s (2020) Relationship-Rich Education: How Human Connections Drive Success in College, which draws from 385 interviews of students and faculty across the United States to provide practical, context-dependent, and evidence-based means for faculty, staff, and administrators to develop relationship-rich practices. Both books contend that (1) relationships promote success in college and (2) institutional personnel and students must work together to achieve the goal.

All students should have access to welcoming, safe, and appropriately challenging environments that promote supportive relationships to enhance their educational experiences and success.  To ensure students do not slip through the cracks, relational practices should permeate the university rather than be offered in isolated pockets as is common among institutions. Felten and Lambert (2020) contend that institutions should recognize and promote four principles to guide relationship-rich education: (1) relentless welcome, (2) inspired learning, (3) webs of relationships, and (4) meaningful questions.  

Image courtesy of Shane Rounce, Unsplash.

Methodology

Practitioners–faculty, staff, and administrators–can foster institutional support by providing empirical evidence that demonstrates the effectiveness and impact of relationship-rich practices. In our roles as business communication faculty, we followed Felten and Lambert’s (2020) recommendation to demonstrate effectiveness through empirical evidence. We relied on their text to identify relationship-rich teaching practices that may enhance students’ educational

experiences, specifically the following:

·       intentionally and purposefully engaging with students before and after class;

·       proposing relationship-focused faculty awards within our department;

·       leveraging assignment feedback to increase connections; and

·       incorporating collaborative quizzes into our assessments

We utilized formal and informal assessments to gauge the effectiveness of these practices. This article focuses on the efficacy of collaborative quizzes from the students’ perspective. Our institution encourages faculty to add quantitative or qualitative questions to end-of-semester online course questionnaires to assess teaching practices. In the fall of 2022, students in three sections of a required 200-level business writing course at a large, Midwestern university (N=72) participated in seven collaborative quizzes and three independent quizzes taken throughout the fall semester. At the semester’s close, students completed a final

assessment on Canvas, which included 10 multiple-choice questions covering the major course learning objectives and one open-ended question (worth 1 point out of 1,000 total points for the semester) asking students to identify and explain their preference between individual and collaborative quizzes. The question follows:

Did you prefer to take collaborative (team quizzes) or individual quizzes? Please explain your answer and be personal, specific, and candid.

Seventy students responded to the question (97% response rate).

Collaborative Quizzes: Description and Rationale

To foster relationships that enhance educational experiences and ultimately lead to positive student outcomes, students need opportunities to enter into meaningful dialogue about course content. Collaborative quizzes foster purposeful relationships with peers as well as the knowledge, skills, and self-efficacy necessary to engage in respectful and fruitful dialogue toward a shared goal.

Students were allowed to use handwritten notes and a translator/dictionary as needed on all quizzes. During the first week of the semester, students were informed of the rationale for these assessments: to enhance motivation for engaging purposefully with course material. The class discussed differences between meaningful accountability and more punitive measures, concluding that meaningful accountability seeks to incentivize an edifying objective, such as arriving prepared for class in order to apply, critique, or ask questions about the material, whereas punitive accountability seeks to “catch” or punish students who did not sufficiently engage with assigned material. The rationale and discussion provided context for the collaborative quizzes, priming students to resist a myopic focus on selecting the right answers and to focus instead on engaging in meaningful dialogue to arrive at a consensus.

Along with providing opportunities for developing meaningful relationships, collaborative quizzes serve to meet standard course learning objectives, such as “Collaborate within team environments to deliver effective messages.” Students engaged with material defining the characteristics of high-performing teams, including the importance of establishing psychological safety and avoiding groupthink (Cardon, 2023). Students also learned how personality and identity characteristics influence team dynamics along with approaches to mitigate the concomitant challenges of individual differences. Students were assigned to teams in week one of the semester and remained with the same teammates throughout the entire semester (barring no unresolvable issues) to provide the time needed for trusting relationships to develop.

Increased content retention is an additional benefit of collaborative quizzes. The more students engage with the material purposefully, the more likely they are to reap positive educational outcomes such as deep learning (Astin, 1999; Harper & Quaye, 2009; Kuh, 2001). When taking a collaborative quiz, the students prepared independently (e.g., reading and taking notes on the material), but during the quiz could discuss the material with peers, articulate rationales for their answers, and ask relevant questions of teammates. Teams were required to submit the same response for quiz questions, which meant teammates had to arrive at a consensus for every answer. If students came to an impasse, they were permitted to request instructor assistance in strategizing the best way forward, another means of learning through modeling. Adjudicating the credibility of different rationales and leveraging compelling evidence in support of a perspective are transferable skills, applicable in other college-level courses and the workforce.

Importantly, not every quiz was collaborative to deter less-motivated team members from taking advantage of more responsible team members. Students did not know in advance if a scheduled quiz would be individual or collaborative, encouraging everyone to come to class prepared.

Results and Analysis

Of the 70 respondents, 91% (N=64) indicated a preference of collaborative quizzes over individual quizzes. To investigate the efficacy of collaborative quizzes in increasing meaningful relationships among peers, the qualitative rationale provided by students was analyzed using emergent, coded themes:

1. Increased collaboration and relationship-building (R)

2. Improved scores/grades (I)

3. Decreased stress levels (L)

4. Increased understanding of course material (C)

5. Increased levels of assurance and affirmation (A)

6. Decreased fairness/ inequity of workload (U)

Individual responses were coded using the six themes, with multiple codes applied if a response included more than one theme. Sixty-nine percent of students (N=48) indicated that collaborative quizzes were preferable due to the increased collaboration and relationship-building the quizzes offered. Additionally, 23% (N=16) of students felt that collaborative quizzes increased assurance in their responses, while 19% (N=13) noted an increase in understanding the material and 18% (N=12) stated their scores improved. Eleven percent (N=6) stated their stress levels were decreased when taking a quiz collaboratively rather than individually.

Although most results supported positive aspects of collaborative quizzes, 11% of respondents (N=8) expressed that collaborative quizzes resulted in inequity, as students who were not prepared for the quizzes were able to rely on teammates who were prepared, yet all students received the same score.

Discussion and Recommended Next Steps

With nearly three-fourths of respondents indicating that collaborative quizzes encouraged relationship-building and collaboration, collaborative quizzes are a viable option for fostering relationship-rich environments in the classroom. Added benefits include potentially reduced anxiety, as students reported the ability to process their questions and doubts with others rather than having to bear the burden alone. For additional information on the value and process of implementing collaborative quizzes, view a recorded session from Indiana University’s 2021 Teaching Faculty Symposium (Graham, 2022).

Our research focused on the implementation of collaborative quizzes, but we identified additional relationship-rich practices and initiatives that were inspired by Felten and Lambert to use in our institutional context. We encourage faculty and institutional decision-makers to implement practices and assess their effectiveness to further clarify the impact of relationship-rich initiatives in varied contexts:

1. Sharing stories from life with students to increase connection and demonstrate vulnerability

2. Engaging purposefully with students before and after class

3. Incorporating collaborative quizzes

4. Making our care explicit to students and colleagues

5. Proposing relationship-related awards within our department

6. Prioritizing calling others by their names (student-to-student & professor-to-student)

7. Utilizing formative and/or innovative assessment and grading practices to acknowledge differences among our students and to center learning over summative grades

8. Leveraging assignment feedback to increase connection, e.g., personalized comments that include students’ names, audio feedback

9. Incorporating attendance or networking questions to increase understanding of individuals within the classroom, e.g., What are you most proud of? What do you do to help create a welcoming and safe environment on team projects? How do you relieve stress?

10. Encouraging students to attend office hours, e.g., renaming them “student hours”

11. Incorporating conferences to facilitate more personal learning conversations with students (individual or small group)

12. Increasing mutual respect and understanding through transparency, e.g., explaining why we do what we do and being open to changing expectations based on student feedback

Conclusion

We encourage you to be advocates for relationship-rich education in your respective contexts, pursuing the meaningful goal of teaching “in a manner that respects and cares for the souls of our students…to provide the necessary conditions where learning can most deeply and intimately begin” (hooks, 1994, p. 13).

Discussion Questions

1. What relationships were meaningful to you in your educational experience? What practices, behaviors, or postures contributed to fostering these meaningful relationships?

2. What organizations, committees, centers, or other support systems are in place at your institution for faculty and staff interested in developing relationship-rich campus environments?

3. What are two or three relationship-rich practices you would like to implement? What are the available support systems and/or accountability mechanisms available to assist you in implementing and assessing your identified practices? 

References

Astin, A. W. (1999). Student involvement: A developmental theory for higher education. Journal of College Student Development, 40(5), 518-29.

Cardon, P. W. (2023). Business communication: Developing leaders for a networked world (5th ed). McGraw-Hill.

Center for Engaged Learning (2023). About CEL. Elon University.

https://www.centerforengagedlearning.org/about-cel/

Center for Engaged Learning. (n.d.) Reading group guide from the Center for Engaged Learning: Relationship-rich education: How human connections drive success in college. Center for Engaged Learning at Elon University. https://www.centerforengagedlearning.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/reading-group-guide_r-r-ed.pdf

Felten, P., & Lambert, L. M. (2020). Relationship-rich education: How human connections drive success in college. JHU Press.

Graham, P. (2022, October 17). Collaborative quizzes: Deepening content knowledge & increasing interpersonal communication skills [Video]. Indiana University. https://iu.mediaspace.kaltura.com/media/t/1_4g5ovdwq

Harper, S. R., & Quaye, S. J. (2009). Student engagement in higher education: Theoretical perspectives and practical approaches for diverse populations. New York, NY: Routledge.

hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom.

Routledge.

Kuh, G. D. (2001). Assessing what really matters to student learning: Inside the National Survey of Student Engagement. Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning, 33(3), 10–17.

Lambert, L., Felten, P., Artze-Vega, I., & Tapia, O. M. (2023). Connections are everything: A college student’s guide to relationship Education. JHU Press.

About the Authors