Companies told researchers that recent grads lacked group work skills. The researchers tried introducing project courses and group work, but that didn't solve the problem. Students showed a bias against collaboration which was not overcome with group work.

Over a three year research project with 130 student interviews by ehtnographic observers, they found 3 techniques which helped foster collaboration:

• The conversational classroom
  Professor facilitation of discussion rather than lectures. The professor yields control over the information to the students, showing the students that they must participate to explore the issues.

• Group decision-making
  Each student contributes a specification. Specifications are distributed to the entire class. Then each student generates a design based on a specification (either their own or another person's).

  Next class, the group selects the criteria for choosing the best design. Over the next couple days, the students assign weights to the criteria and evaluate each design based on the criteria. Finally, as a class, they chose the best design to use for their assignment.

  Once the design is chosen, changes were only permitted if everyone agreed that the change would increase previously accepted criteria values.

• Assignment devaluation
  If the individual work is highly rewarded, it will be valued more than group work. So, individual assignments were not given as much weight on the students' grades.

(Side note: The conversational classroom sounds similar to Problem-Based Learning.)

Effectively, if you want to teach collaboration and group work, you have to integrate it into the very fiber of the class. You have to make everything collaborative - the classtime learning, the decision making concerning assignments, and the student grades. The results of the study showed that after strong resistance, the techniques led to better performance and increased student satisfaction.

Waite, W. M., Jackson, M. H., Diwan, A., & Leonardi, P. M. (2004). Student culture vs group work in computer science. Proceedings of the 35th SIGCSE Technical Symposium for Computer Science Education (pp. 12-16). New York: Association for Computing Machinery Press.