Collaborative Learning: Students’ Perspectives on How Learning Happens

Professional education must adequately prepare graduates to practice in a continually changing context; for example, graduates will increasingly work in cross-disciplinary teams and with people from diverse backgrounds. Therefore, an adequate professional education should “actively engage preservice [professionals] in opportunities for knowledge seeking, for problem solving, and for the collaborating necessary for effective practice” (Evensen & Hmelo-Silver, 2000, p. 1). Accordingly, to provide students with opportunities to develop future work skills, collaborative learning (CL), a core component of inquiry-based learning approaches, is often used in professional education. CL has advantages over other learning methods, such as sharing learning experiences; learning information-searching