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January 22, 2006

Characteristics of Effective Group Assignments

The Building Learning Teams paper further identifies characteristics of effective group assignments:

"• Must require the groups to produce a tangible output.  Otherwise, neither the instructor nor the students will have any idea about whether or not students have developed the ability to use the concepts effectively.

"• Must be impossible to complete unless students understand course concepts.  Otherwise, students are likely to see them as irrelevant “make work” projects and neither the instructor nor students will have any idea how well the concepts are understood.

"• Must be difficult enough that very few, if any, of the students can successfully complete the assignment working alone.  Otherwise, the majority of group members will sit back and watch the better students do the work.

"• Should allow the groups to spend the majority of their time engaged in the kinds of activities that groups do well (e.g., identifying problems, formulating strategies, processing information, making decisions) and a minimum of time engaged in activities that individuals could do more efficiently working alone (e.g., creating a polished written document).  In fact, the greater the length of required written documents, the less students are likely to learn from the assignment.  (i.e., when groups are assigned to produce a lengthy document, the only thing that is likely to be done by the group is deciding how to carve up the project into manageable pieces -- the rest will be individual work.)

"• Should give students the opportunity to practice dealing with the same kind of issues and problem situations they will encounter in later course work or in future jobs.  Being able to see how the concepts apply to realistic problems is a tremendous asset to both motivation and learning.

"• Should be interesting and/or fun." Building Learning Teams, p. 11

Posted by DavidK at January 22, 2006 12:01 PM | Permalink

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