An Effective Group Incentive Mechanism in a Collaborative Problem-Based Learning System for Enhancing Positive Peer Interaction and Learning Performance

Many studies have confirmed that the collaborative problem-based learning (CPBL) mode is an increasingly popular educational paradigm that has highly potential to cultivate learners' collaborative learning and problem solving abilities. However, how to effectively promote positive group members' interaction and group accountability is a critical issue in the CPBL mode. This work thus presents a group incentive mechanism (GIM) based on considering several important factors affecting peers' interaction and group accountability in collaborative learning theories to promote the learning performance learners in a CPBL system. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed GIM, this work recruited 48 Grade 4 students from an elementary school to participate in the instruction experiment. The quasi-experimental design was adopted to assess the differences in learning performance, interaction relationship, group efficacy, and group cohesiveness between the experimental group learners using the proposed GIM and control group learners using the individual incentive mechanism (IIM) under using the CPBL system to collaboratively solve a target problem. Analytical results show that although the control group learners using the IIM had higher social network interaction than the experimental group learners using the proposed GIM, the experimental group learners presents better learning performance and group efficacy than the control group.