University accreditation and benchmarking: Pedagogy that increases student achievement

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" Collaborative study groups were used as the treatment condition for pedagogy, on the test group, but students independently studied (in class) for the control group. The collaborative study groups seemed to have helped students increase their peer learning since this was essentially the major different between the groups. Students would have explained concepts to one another in their own nomenclature. Students were encouraged to walk through the problem solving process together. This would have tapped into brain storming and out of the box thinking, both of which the control group would not have had access to within the experiment. Nonetheless there was nothing preventing control group students from collaborating outside the class, yet in the treatment condition a knowledgeable professor guided and facilitated the teams of students." (p. 217)

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