Gaps in predicting impressions while expressing opinions during collaborative learning

Abstract

This study focused on collaborative learning and students’ inferences about the views of other students. Previous social psychology studies of reasoning about others’ views have demonstrated that people generally overestimate the harshness of others’ judgments. This study investigated whether students thought that other students had good impressions of them when they expressed their opinions during collaborative learning. Furthermore, it examined whether a gap existed between the students’ views of the impressions other students had of them when they expressed opinions and the students’ impressions of others who expressed their opinions. Second-year junior high school students answered questions about doing group work with several classmates in a social studies class. Analysis of variance demonstrated that the students’ impressions of other students who expressed their opinions were better than the students’ impressions of themselves when they expressed their opinions to others. In addition, the students predicted that the other students had high impressions of them in absolute terms when they expressed their opinions, and the gap arose because the students had higher impressions of the other students.