When we consider excellence in education, we often focus on solely on student characteristics. Consistent, however, with Subotnik, Olszewski-Kubilius, and Worrell (2011), we argue that excellence is not only students’ abilities, but a manifestation of students’ behaviors in a specific context. Therefore, it is important to consider context when students’ potential for excellence is examined (Barab & Plucker, 2002). With collaboration being an important twenty first-century skill (Binkley et al., 2012), this study focuses on educational contexts in which students collaborate with each other. More specifically, this study investigates how students with differences in potential for excellence perceive a collaborative learning environment. This is the first step in a more elaborate study on students’ (excellent) collaborative behavior. Undergraduate students from two business-related educational programs participated in the current study (N=261). Three aspects of potential for excellence were taken into account: intelligence, creativity, and first-year GPA. In line with Lizzio and Wilson (2005), both aspects of the collaborative task (survey based on Kyndt, Dochy, Struyven, and Cascallar (2011)) and group dynamics (survey based on Edmondson (1999) were concerned to provide an image of the collaborative learning environment. A hierarchical cluster analysis was performed to distinguish different student profiles based on the aspects of potential for excellence. This resulted in three distinguishable clusters. Multiple Analyses of Variance (ANOVAs) showed that, first, the three clusters mainly differed in their level of creativity. Second, no differences were found between students with a different excellence profile in how they perceived the collaborative task (workload and complexity of the task) and their safety within the group. This indicates that students’ excellence profile does not matter for how students’ perceive a collaborative learning environment. More characteristics of the different clusters and implications will be discussed during the presentation.

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