Overall Peer Justice Predicts Inclusion in Student Teams in Biomedical Engineering
摘要
Professors want students to feel included, but there has been little work on how to engender inclusion in collaborative learning. Recent work suggests that justice determines inclusion at the within-person level in student teams: an individual feels included on occasions when justice is high. In this article, we examine whether justice predicts inclusion at higher levels of analysis. Our hypotheses are that justice predicts a sense of inclusion at the between-person level and between-team-level: individuals and teams will have higher mean inclusion when their justice levels are high.
MethodsFour studies were conducted with data from 894 undergraduates across 342 teams, primarily from a biomedical engineering program. Overall peer justice was the independent variable, construed as a combination of distributive, procedural, interpersonal, and informational justice. Inclusion was construed as a combination of belonging and authenticity. Multilevel latent mean models were used for data analysis. Both unadjusted and adjusted models were specified.
ResultsJustice robustly predicted inclusion at the between-team and between-person levels. In two-person teams, there was also a contextual effect, indicating that the first partner’s justice perception affected the second partner’s inclusion level, holding other factors constant.
ConclusionsInstructors are likely to increase inclusion if they teach students about justice and set up team processes to maintain justice. Monitoring justice levels and ameliorating cases of injustice may also be helpful.