Nineteenth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

Abstract

The subject of student engagement has been a major topic of interest at educational institutions across the globe. The US Department of Education recognizes student engagement as a key element in creating a positive school climate and acknowledges its links to academic achievement. In this light, collaboration has been shown to be an effective technique that increases student engagement. However, collaboration efforts have largely focused on those among students and those among teachers separately, and the concept of teacher-student collaboration is relatively new. The American Psychological Association makes it clear that students who have ‘close, positive, and supportive relationships with their teachers will attain higher levels of achievement’. Thus, this exploratory study focused on the concept of teacher-student collaboration by implementing a collaborative course project in a class of seven graduate students. Students were asked to collaborate with the instructor, and each prepare a research abstract for a peer-reviewed conference venue. Instead of assigning students a specific topic for their research and grading them on their final output, emphasis was based on how the student worked as a collaborator to collectively come up with the topic and how they shared responsibilities with the instructor, while at the same time taking leadership and ownership of their work. This collaborative effort resulted in seven research abstracts submitted for peer-review, with four out of the seven being accepted for presentation. The remaining three abstracts were further revised based on comments and submitted for another conference.