COLLABORATIVE LEARNING - EFFECTS OF STUDENT EXPECTATIONS AND COMMUNICATION APPREHENSION ON STUDENT MOTIVATION

This study examines the effects of students' communication expectation s and communication apprehension on the development of student motivat ion in collaborative learning (CL) group activities. The central quest ion addressed here concerns the ways in which such communication predi spositions promote or detract from individual students' motivation rel ative to their groups. Upper-division undergraduates (N = 96) worked i n small groups on three CL tasks in sessions which featured different communication modalities (group discussion, writing/peer commentary, a nd interactive computer conferencing). Measures of pre-session expecta ncies and channel-specific apprehension were combined to classify stud ents into four categories of optimal challenge predispositions. Post-s ession measures of emergent motivation or intrinsic rewards included: (a) expectancy fulfillment; (a) state anxiety; (c) communicative activ ity; and (d) satisfaction with the CL interaction. Results showed dist inctive patterns of emergent motivation for students in each of the fo ur optimal challenge categories for each of the CL learning modalities . Instructional implications for the use of collaborative learning are discussed.