Group Work in HyFlex Classrooms: The Influence of Remote Attendance on STEM Learning Outcomes

Abstract

The COVID pandemic disrupted and challenged higher education institutions across the United States to find an effective and feasible solution to deliver instruction without impacting students’ social interaction and performance. The Highly Flexible (HyFlex) model, which blends two modes, face-to-face and online instruction, emerged as an effective solution during the pandemic and has the potential to be beneficial in the post-pandemic world. Using social constructivism as the guiding theory, this study examined whether students' attendance patterns (extent of remoteness) during group work in a HyFlex classroom affected their group performance (grades on group assignments). Previous research on HyFlex has investigated understanding how attendance patterns affect students’ individual performance, while limited studies have investigated group performance. This study used a sample of 648 STEM students, enrolled in a first-year design course at a large midwestern university in the United States, who completed two significant group projects during the fall 2021 semester. Data were analyzed using the non-experimental Pearson correlational design method, where the two continuous variables included group remoteness and group performance. The results indicated a slightly negative correlation that was not statistically significant for the two projects, hinting that the remote participation might have a very minor negative effect on group grades in collaborative STEM learning environments. Based on the weak correlation between student participation and group grades, the HyFlex model can be cautiously adopted in the future for STEM courses that involve working in groups, even in the post-pandemic period.