Who Wants To Collaborate? A Step Towards Understanding Collaboration As Choice

Emphasis on 21st century skills has placed much importance on providing students with collaboration opportunities, despite the resistance by some students who prefer to work alone. In order to facilitate a flexible learning environment that fosters both individual productivity as well as collaborative problem solving, we designed a study to better understand the factors influencing students' choice to collaborate in an online setting. We developed a web-based learning software for practicing linked list exercises and conducted a study with 67 participants in a CS2 class. Our results indicate that online collaboration provides a peer learning opportunity for students with lower confidence to become more comfortable with the material. Moreover, we analyzed student data and report on the performance tradeoffs (speed vs. number of mistakes) between working collaboratively and working solo.