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Group Work

Research has demonstrated that an important factor in student success in university studies is the opportunity for students to work in groups. While many academics would like to include group work, there is often hesitation because of bad experiences when groups have fallen apart and have failed to complete the tasks or left the work to one or a few students who have felt badly put upon.

There are many advantages to including some group work in the assessment design, but if included, it must be thoughtfully managed.

Benefits in Using Group Work:

• When students have to explain and negotiate their contributions to a group project, it assists them in developing and increasing their meta-cognitive awareness. That is, in 'low risk' contexts they begin to know what they know and know what they have yet to learn or find out.
• Group projects provides opportunities for developing generic skills such as:
  • organisation,
  • negotiation
  • delegation,
  • team work,
  • co-operation,
  • leadership,
  • following
    These skills are not automatically picked up but are skills that must be explicitly taught and critically evaluated just like essay writing, and critical reading
• Group work is useful for encouraging social interaction for isolated, rural and overseas students
• Group work can be a means for acknowledging and utilising individual students' additional strengths and expertise
• With a small group of students exploring a topic in a limited time frame, there are opportunities for their collaborative product of their studies to go to greater depth and breadth
• Group work can be used for real world work on authentic real world projects
• Group work can be used to provides opportunities to work in multidisciplinary teams as learning communities exploring specific themes or issues.
• Large group projects provide a legitimate vehicle for making assessment a central aspect of a topic
• Group assessment is more public and accountable for its intentions and judgments.
• If the student learning output is a group effort it will reduce the assessment workload by a factor of the number in the groups and thus can be a more efficient means of assessing. However, although the interpreting a grading aspect may be reduce the management and guidance demands may well be higher than it is for individual projects or papers.

Problems and Challenges in Using Groups

• Teams fall apart
• It can advantage some students and disadvantage others
• Considerable time is spent in organising the group and planning action
• Difficult to grade individual input
• "Group Think": Some groups malfunction when the preservation of the group becomes more important than the task at hand or the ideas.
• Creation of "team players": not being a team player means dissenting from the group identity. Independent thinkers are not popular in a group environment

When to Use Groupwork

As suggested by Gary Poole, visiting AUTC scholar 2001:

• When quality is more important than efficiency
  Groupwork can be inefficient. It should be used to improve the quality of student product.
• When the total amount of information processed or generated is more important than ideas.
  Using techniques such as group brainstorming can reduce the number of ideas generated as students discuss the ideas rather than come up with new ideas.
• When the task lends itself to a division of labour

Setting Up Teams

• Assign groups
• Allocate students to groups rather than allowing them to pick groups themselves. Base your assignments on your identification of high and low contributors as evident in previous meetings
• Artificially place groups into smaller sub-groups mixing gender, age, culture in order to force interaction if none is occurring
• Keep to smaller numbers. An eight member team is too large for effective project management and allows some members to "disappear"
• Roles
  Either assign specific roles or allow students to choose. Ensure that all group members are sure what their roles in the group are. Possible roles include:
• Note taker
• Chair
• Change teams from time to time

Strategies That Enhance Effective Group Assignments

• Discourage anonymity by limiting size of groups.
• Make the feedback public in the group.
• Allow in class time for group meetings and planning and make yourself accessible to groups.
• Design formative assessment on both the work itself AND the group work.
• Allow for the time required to make groups work
• As a rule, assign students to groups rather than allowing them to self select.
• Share the final products of the group work with the entire class and invite critique.
• Encourage disagreement within group discussions as a tool to foster creativity.
• Vary the products of group work
• Presentations with clearly defined rules and criteria including the insistence that a presentation must engage the audience.
• Poster Presentations
• Individual follow up assessments
• Process analysis in that the process of the groupwork is assigned a grade. Make effective group interaction and co-operation a criteria in grading

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