Are your group projects in need of a little
assistance…helpful hints are listed below!
Designing Group Work
Assign group work at the beginning of the term
so that students develop skills for working in groups.
Use multiple-choice tests that include
higher-level questions. To allow time for discussion, present about
twenty-five items for a fifty-minute in-class exam.
Divide students into groups of five.
Have students take the test individually and
turn in their responses before they meet with their group. Then ask
the groups to arrange themselves in the room and arrive at a group
consensus answer for each question. Score the individual and group
responses and prepare a chart showing the average individual score
of each group's members, the highest individual score in each group,
and the group's consensus score. Ninety-five percent of the time,
the group consensus scores will be higher than the average
individual scores (Toppins, 1989).
For more information on group exams, see "Quizzes,
Tests, and Exams."
Organizing Learning Groups
Decide how the groups will be formed.
Some faculty prefer randomly assigning students to groups to maximize
their heterogeneity: a mix of males and females, verbal and quiet
students, the cynical and the optimistic (Fiechtner and Davis, 1992;
Smith, 1986). Some faculty let students choose with whom they want to
work, although this runs the risk that groups will socialize too much
and that students will self-segregate (Cooper, 1990). Self-selected
groups seem to work best in small classes, for classes of majors who
already know one another, or in small residential colleges (Walvoord,
1986). Still other instructors prefer to form the groups themselves,
taking into account students' prior achievement, levels of preparation,
work habits, ethnicity, and gender (Connery, 1988). They argue for
making sure that members of each group are exclusively graded students
or exclusively pass/ not pass students and that well-prepared students
be placed in groups with other well-prepared students. Other faculty,
however, try to sprinkle the more able students evenly among the groups
(Walvoord, 1986). A middle ground, proposed by Walvoord (1986), is to
ask students to express a preference, if they wish, then make the
assignments yourself. You could, for example, ask students to write down
the names of three students with whom they would most like to work.
Be conscious of group size. In
general, groups of four or five members work best. Larger groups
decrease each member's opportunity to participate actively. The less
skillful the group members, the smaller the groups should be. The
shorter amount of time available, the smaller the groups should be.
(Sources: Cooper, 1990; Johnson, Johnson, and Smith, 1991; Smith, 1986)
Keep groups together. When a group is not working well,
avoid breaking it up, even if the group requests it. The addition of the
floundering group's members to ongoing groups may throw off their group
process, and the bailed-out troubled group does not learn to cope with
its unproductive interactions. (Source: Wolvoord, 1986)
Help groups plan how to proceed. Ask
each group to devise a plan of action: who will be doing what and when.
Review the groups' written plans or meet with each group to discuss its
plan.
Regularly check in with the groups. If
the task spans several weeks, you will want to establish checkpoints
with the groups. Ask groups to turn in outlines or drafts or to meet
with you.
Provide mechanisms for groups to deal with
uncooperative members. Walvoord (1986) recommends telling the
class that after the group task is completed, each student will submit
to the instructor an anonymous assessment of the participation of the
other group members: who did extra work and who shirked work. If several
people indicate that an individual did less than a fair share, that
person could receive a lower grade than the rest of the group. This
system works, says Walvoord, if groups have a chance in the middle of
the project to discuss whether any members are not doing their share.
Members who are perceived as shirkers then have an opportunity to make
amends. Here are some other options for dealing with shirkers:
Keep the groups at three students: it is hard to
be a shirker in a small group.
Make it clear that each group must find its own
way to handle unproductive group behavior.
Allow the groups, by majority vote, to dismiss a
member who is not carrying a fair share. Students who are dropped
from a group must persuade the group to reconsider, find acceptance
in another group, or take a failing grade for the project.
Perhaps the best way to assure comparable effort among all group
members is to design activities in which there is a clear division of
labor and each student must contribute if the group is to reach its
goal. (Sources: Connery, 1988; Walvoord, 1986)
Evaluating Group Work
Insure that individual student performance is
assessed and that the groups know how their members are doing.
Groups need to know who needs more assistance in completing the
assignment, and members need to know they cannot let others do all the
work while they sit back. Ways to ensure that students are held
accountable include giving spot quizzes to be completed individually and
calling on individual students to present their group's progress.
(Source: Johnson, Johnson, and Smith, 1991)
Give students an opportunity to evaluate the effectiveness of their
group. Once or twice during the group work task, ask group members to
discuss two questions: What action has each member taken that was
helpful for the group? What action could each member take to make the
group even better? At the end of the project, ask students to complete a
brief evaluation form on the effectiveness of the group and its members.
The form could include items about the group's overall accomplishments,
the student's own role, and suggestions for changes in future group
work. Rau and Heyl (1990) have developed a form that can be used for an
interim or final evaluation. (Sources: Johnson, Johnson, and Smith,
1991; Walvoord, 1986)
Decide how to grade members of the group. Some faculty assign all
students in the group the same grade on the group task. Grading students
individually, they argue, inevitably leads to competition within the
group and thus subverts the benefits of group work. Other faculty grade
the contribution of each student on the basis of individual test scores
or the group's evaluation of each member's work. If you assign the same
grade to the entire group, the grade should not account for more than a
small part of a student's grade in the class (perhaps a few bonus points
that would raise a test score from a B - to a B). (Sources: Cooper,
1990; Johnson, Johnson, and Smith, 1991)
Dealing with Student and Faculty Concerns About
Group Work
I paid my tuition to learn from a professor,
not to have to work with my classmates, who don't know as much."
Let students know at the beginning of the term that you will be using
some group techniques. Students who are strongly antagonistic can drop
your class and select another. Inform students about the research
studies on the effectiveness of collaborative learning and describe the
role it will play in your course. Invite students to try it before
deciding whether to drop the class. (Source: Cooper and Associates, 1990
Our group just isn't working out. Encourage students to
stick with it. Changing group membership should really be a last resort.
Help your students learn how to be effective group members by
summarizing for them some of the information in "Leading a Discussion"
and "Encouraging Student Participation in Discussion."
"Students won't want to work in groups." Some students may object, in
part because most of their education has been based on individual
effort, and they may feel uncomfortable helping others or seeking help.
The best advice is to explain your rationale, design well-structured
meaningful tasks, give students clear directions, set expectations for
how team members are to contribute and interact, and invite students to
try it. (Source: Cooper and Associates, 1990)
Students won't work well in groups.
Most students can work well in
groups if you set strong expectations at the beginning of the term,
informally check in with groups to see how things are going, offer
assistance as needed, and provide time for groups to assess their own
effectiveness. Some groups may indeed have problems, but usually these
can be resolved. See "Encouraging Student Participation in Discussion"
for suggestions on how to minimize monopolizers, draw out quiet
students, and generally engage all students in active participation.
If I do group work, I won't be able to cover as much material during
the semester as I do when I lecture. Yes, adding group work may mean
covering fewer topics. But research shows that students who work in
groups develop an increased ability to solve problems and evidence
greater understanding of the material. Some instructors assign
additional homework or readings or distribute lecture notes to
compensate for less material "covered" in class. (Source: Cooper and
Associates, 1990)
