Two-hundred-and-ninety secondary school students from Years 7, 9 and 11 completed questionnaires relating to motivational goals, metacognitive awareness, need for af liation, social anxiety and feelings towards group work. Factor analysis revealed three attitudes towards participation in group work: a preference for group environments, a preference for individual work environments, and a sense of discomfort in group environments. Students reporting a preference for group work also indicated higher levels of sociability, lower levels of social anxiety, stronger mastery and performance goals, and greater levels of metacognitive awareness. Students expressing a preference for individual work environments reported lower levels of sociability and higher levels of social anxiety, but were not differentiated on any of the cognitive measures. Students reporting discomfort in groups similarly reported enhanced levels of social anxiety combined with lower levels of sociability, but also indicated lower levels of metacognitive awareness. Results are discussed in the context of current theoretical and empirical work on group-based learning.This paper examines the role of individual differences in explaining secondary students' attitudes towards engaging in group-based learning. There is a strong literature suggestive of bene ts to students of group based learning (for a review, see Slavin, 1996). From a Vygotskian perspective, there are clear and well documented cognitive advantages to establishing group based learning environments. King (1997), for example, points to the metacognitive advantages of using group learning contexts as a means of facilitating higher-order learning. However, we suggest that little attention in this literature has been given to the underlying cognitive and psychological factors that may in uence both the willingness of students to take part in group learning, and the degree to which group learning might effectively occur. We propose that the use of groupbased learning is premised on three assumptions: rst, that all children are comfortable

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