The Power of We: Using Instant Messaging for Student Group Project Discussion

Online group work has been identified as an important issue in Web-based education for a long time. With the prevalence of instant messaging in adolescents, more and more students opt to choose this emerging synchronous communication medium for online group project discussion. In this paper, we-intention to use instant messaging for online group project discussion was examined and a research model of we-intention was proposed and empirically tested with 482 students in China. The research model explains 43.2% of the variance in we-intention and attitude, anticipated emotions, group norms and social identity are found statistically significant. Implications for both researchers and practitioners are discussed.