The Small Study Group I remember I am in a small study group one time to study math notes with my classmates before the exam. We have four girls in the small study group, and we are all from the same math professor’s class. As for the definition of the small group communication, I think the reason that four of us gather together is we hope to review for our math exam better with the helps from each group member. In order to accomplish our task, there are some obvious features about small group communication happening during the small group studying time. Before I learn about small group communication, the reason we only want to have less than five people is that we all think if there are a lot of people study together, the efficiency would reduce and nobody can get a better review. However, after I learn the chapter about small group communication. I know that among the three primary features, the first primary feature is group size. And 5 to 7 people are the ideal small group size for small group communication. What’s more, this ideal small group size gives us an advantage that every group member can understand and memorize better of the math notes being reviewing by the group. During the study, we decide to go over chapters one by one. And if any member has question, we will stop and try to solve problems together. For example, one of the girls has problem about how to plug the real value in the formula. So I write the question on the blackboard and do it one step by one step. And because my English is not very good, the rest of group members can help me answer questions according to my writing if the girl can’t understand some steps. And after we do the problems together, I feel I remember these kinds of questions deeply, and I will not forget if I have the similar question on the exam. And the other three girls tell me they understand better and won’t make mistakes about these questions during the exam. As for our behaviors, I know they belong to the second primary feature: interdependence. I think interdependence is important to small group communication because we need every group members to help and support to each other. We only have a few people in the study group, and if someone have difficulty to deal with their problems, the others should help them to get through their tough work. And all of them can take advantages from small study group. And we are review math notes; we should redo several math questions again. So we have problem-solving talk. Problem-solving talk is a type of talk, and type of talk is one of three secondary features of small group communication. Some of the group members do not know how to do the questions, so we have problem-solving talk to find a right way to get the right answers. As for getting the right answers, sometimes we have conflicts among group members because there is more than one way to get the final answers, or one of us has the wrong answers. Conflicts can’t be avoided in our study group, because we can’t be 100% sure about that our answers are absolutely correct. So the conflict is one of the disadvantages with working in a small group. Although we can’t avoid conflicts happening in our small study group, we can manage the conflicts by members’ competitive and collaborative inspirations. Competition and collaboration are styles of conflict management. We need to use competitive management because it is a study group for mathematics, we need each group member solve the problem individually first, and compete everyone’s answer and find the best one to regard as the example to show to the rest of group people. And we also need collaborative management because sometimes only one person can’t solve the problems. So the others should work together and all of group members can get the correct answers successfully. In order to accelerate the process about dealing with conflicts in groups, we should avoid a “defensive climate”, and promote a “supportive climate”. For
