Monday, March 17, 2014

Thoughts on group assignments

I divide groups in a couple of different ways. For my online student success class (taught fully online), I divide the class into four groups (usually seven or eight per group) based on their grade at that point in the class (three weeks into a six-week class) to do one small assignment. I use the course grade as a means of judging ability and responsibility, so each group has students who are roughly the same in those areas. The best students are in a group together, and the worst students are in a group together. My rationale is that high-functioning people need to learn how to deal with other high-functioning people and not assume that they will automatically be the leaders of any group they are in. At the other end, someone in the free riders will have to step up and show some leadership else the group will fail. They only have a week to complete the assignment. I find generally that students appreciate the group assignment (note I did not say enjoy), though the students in that bottom quartile who do not participate generally are not interested in the class anyway. None of the students complain about having flaky peers.

In my (full term) American history class, I create groups based on shared interest. This is a face-to-face class, though the assignment would be the same for an online class and the method of dividing the groups would likely not change. The group project for the class is to create a web site that requires students to collect primary source documents, analyze them, and write a synthesis of those analyses. One of my introductory lectures for the class is to show the students that some of the questions we are asking ourselves as Americans (like what our country's place is in the world) have always been asked. I present a series of questions and show examples of how those questions were asked in the time period covered by our course and how those questions are being asked today. I tell them that throughout our class those questions will come up again and again and that those questions help us as historians make sense of all the different ways we can look at the past. After the lecture, I ask each student to tell me what he or she thinks is the most important question. I use those answers to create groups of six to eight students, and those groups are together throughout the semester and the web site. I do this in lieu of an individual research paper, and they tell me in my end-of-class survey that they feel like they learn more about the past through this assignment than they would have with a traditional research paper. I use a peer review survey to get them to share how much effort they and their group mates put in, and I use the results of that survey to adjust individual grades.

Both of these methods require a lot of work. I could divide the class randomly or let students pick their own groups, but I like to have some kind of instructional design behind what I do in class. I have been grouping by ability in my online student success class for the dozen years that I have been teaching it, and so far it has worked great. I am grouping by interest for the second time this semester, and one change I have already made is to have my students do the peer review survey three times instead of once. That way they can adjust their work ethic if necessary before they get going on the big project.

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