The change of participants’ perspectives on goal setting for group discussion at an early stage

Abstract

Group discussion (GD) skills play an important role not only in the education of college students but also in their social life. However, the number of studies on GD for novice college students is limited. The present work aims to clarify the change in the participants’ perspectives of their goal settings written after GD. Therefore, content analysis was conducted on the basis of the three domains of GD: (1) individual, (2) group, and (3) knowledge. Ten GD sessions involving four or five members were conducted. Comparison between the former five and the latter five sessions revealed reductions in “developing argument” and “creating affable atmosphere” in the group domain. Conversely, some skills in the individual domain increased in the latter sessions. These results indicated that participants changed their perspectives from a group to an individual one with regards to their contributions to GD as an individual, which include important suggestions to improve the GD skills of novice learners.