Cultivating 21st-Century Collaboration Skills: The Roles of Group Learning and Interactive Whiteboard-Integrated Instruction in Middle School Social Studies

Harmin Saiful; Rego Devilla; Saripuddin Saripuddin

doi:10.63922/ijevss.v5i04.6480

Harmin Saiful Master's Program in Economics Education, Postgraduate Faculty, Universitas Patompo, Makassar, Indonesia
Rego Devilla Master's Program in Economics Education, Postgraduate Faculty, Universitas Patompo, Makassar, Indonesia
Saripuddin Saripuddin Master's Program in Economics Education, Postgraduate Faculty, Universitas Patompo, Makassar, Indonesia

DOI: https://doi.org/10.63922/ijevss.v5i04.6480

Keywords: Group Learning; Interactive Whiteboard; Smartboard-Integrated Instruction; Collaboration Skills; Social Studies Education.

Abstract

Collaboration is widely recognized as one of the core twenty-first-century competencies, alongside critical thinking, creativity, and communication, that education systems worldwide are seeking to cultivate, yet quantitative evidence on which classroom conditions most reliably predict it, particularly in social studies instruction, remains limited. This study examined the effects of group learning and interactive learning with smartboard (interactive whiteboard) integration on the collaboration skills of Grade VII students in social studies at a public middle school, using an ex post facto, associative quantitative design. Data were collected via Likert-scale questionnaires from all 55 Grade VII students (saturated sampling) and analysed with multiple linear regression in IBM SPSS Statistics 26. Results showed that group learning had no statistically significant effect on students' collaboration skills (B = 0.233, t = 1.303, p = .198), whereas interactive learning with smartboard integration had a significant positive effect (B = 0.727, t = 5.824, p < .001) and was the dominant predictor (standardized beta = .691 versus .155). Together, the two variables significantly predicted collaboration skills (F = 49.883, p < .001), explaining 65.7% of its variance (R-squared = .657; adjusted R-squared = .644). Diagnostic testing confirmed no multicollinearity (tolerance = .468, VIF = 2.137 for both predictors) and no clear heteroscedasticity, although the group learning-collaboration relationship showed a significant deviation from linearity, a finding discussed as a boundary condition on the non-significant result. The findings suggest that merely placing students in groups is insufficient to build collaboration skills unless accompanied by genuinely interactive, technology-supported pedagogy, with implications for social studies classrooms in resource-comparable school systems worldwide.

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