Introducing group work in college science classrooms can lead to noticeable gains in student achievement, reasoning ability, and motivation. To realize these gains, students must all contribute. Strategies like assigning roles, group contracts, anonymous peer evaluations, and peer ratings all encourage student participation. In a class using these strategies, we conducted in-depth interviews to uncover student perceptions of group work in general and the utility of these support strategies. Students in both high- and low-performance groups still complained of unequal contributions while praising the social support provided by groups. Students who scored highly on tests were more likely to recognize the benefits of group work, regardless of their groups’ overall performance levels, while lower-scoring students perceived group work as time-consuming “busy work” with little cognitive benefit. Comments from anonymous peer evaluations differed only subtly between high- and low-performance groups. Numerical ratings on these evaluations did correlate with overall group performance. However, students in lower-performance groups assigned harsh ratings to their low-scoring members, while students in higher-performance groups were more generous in their ratings for low-scoring members. We discuss implications of relying on support strategies for promoting productive group work.

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In view of the United Nations’ (UN’s) Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) for education (SDG4), this study explored how information and communications and media technology (ICMT) access and uses for learning have influenced students’ perceived success during the COVID-19 pandemic era and the differential effects of ICMT access and use on underrepresented minority (URM) and non-URM students. This study applied structural equation modeling (SEM) analysis using data from students who experienced online transition in one large public university in the United States. The results showed that ICMT uses for learning benefitted URM students but lack of ICMT access had a negative effect on online learning among URM students. We discussed the implications of these findings in the context of online education, digital inclusion, and the UN’s SDG4.