Self-selection or random assignment as options for short-term groups

My last post focused on a strategic way of forming student teams based on the Team-Based Learning Collaborative's guidelines, an approach that aims to construct teams that work well for longer-term, high-stakes tasks and assignments.  What about the more spontaneous, less-planning-involved options?  There are times when an instructor wants to use a quick group activity to break up a lecture, for example, and taking the time to identify and prioritize criteria for sorting students just isn't feasible or even needed.

Students self-selecting groups or the instructor randomly assigning students to groups are suitable approaches when the groups will only be intact for a short period of time and/or for low-stakes tasks.  Having a go-to method for randomly assigning students is often useful, and there are a number of options that can be executed quickly, e.g., having students count off by the number of desired teams.  For a creative twist on randomly assigning students to teams, check out this Geography-based approach used by Dr. Sarah Bednarz at Texas A&M:

"For short term groups (one or two classes), I frequently use random assignment, e.g., as students enter class they are given a card with an identifier such as the continents, islands, capital cities (geography examples in my case). Then, when it is time to form the groups, I can simply ask all the Antarcticas to move to the back of the room; all the South Americas to the front, etc."

This example of group formation is one of several offered by the Faculty Teaching and Learning Portal at Texas A&M University; see more examples and an expanded discussion of team formation here.  A Faculty Focus newsletter from last summer, "Better Group Work Experiences Begin with How the Groups Are Formed," highlights a few more quick ways to randomly assign students to groups (e.g., birthdays, last digit of cell phone number) as part of a comparison of random assignment, student-formed, and instructor-formed groups.

What about the students selecting their own groups?  The research on this approach seems to be mixed, at best.  For example, both van der Laan Smith and Spindle (2007) and Hilton and Phillips (2010) document the benefits to students when students are allowed to self-select groups (higher grades for high-achieving students and higher quality work reported by students, respectively) for accounting courses; however, the aforementioned Faculty Focus newsletter points out that trade-offs do exist.  Students working within self-selected groups must grapple with the challenge of transitioning from social interactions to completing tasks and are not necessarily expanding their experiences of working with individuals they do not know.  The observation from Hilton and Phillips (2010) that students are more likely to get to work immediately when working together with others that they already know may be advantage enough to overlook these potential downsides when dealing with short-term, low-stakes group situations.

References:

Hilton, S., & Phillips, F. (2010). Instructor-assigned and student-selected groups: A view from inside. Issues In Accounting Education, 25(1), 15-33.

van der Laan Smith, J., & Spindle, R. (2007). The impact of group formation in a cooperative learning environment. Journal of Accounting Education, 25(4), 153-167.

A process for sorting students into diverse teams

I have recently agreed to teach a class during the Fall 2014 semester, so I am listening more closely than ever to conversations related to forming students into teams as I anticipate teaching in one of the active learning classrooms.  Don't get me wrong, I've used group work in classes many times before, but there is something about the active learning room being focused on students working in groups that has me thinking more carefully about group formation.  What is the best way to organize students into teams?  In the past, I've tried a variety of approaches, including organizing students by major/program and gender (with the hopes of a somewhat even distribution), allowing students to choose their own, and enlisting our course management system to randomly assign students to groups.  Other instructors on campus have students join teams based on availability for meetings, skills/strengths that align with group roles, grades in prerequisite courses - the list goes on and on.  As with most other things, the best option for organizing students into teams seems to largely depend on the objective.  

Given that there are options aplenty, one group formation approach at a time will be highlighted here in order to allow room for some discussion of the when and why aspects.  Today's focus is on the approach recommended by the Team-Based Learning Collaborative, which aims to provide all teams with equal chances at success.  The general advice from the Collaborative (see response to forming teams FAQ here) points to three recommendations:

1. distribute assets and liabilities ("background factors that are likely to make a difference in students' performance in this class") as evenly as possible across groups, 
2. be sure that teams do not include pre-existing subgroups that may hinder the team's ability to work together as a whole (e.g., three roommates paired with two other students who do not know each other), and 
3. teams are formed using a process that is transparent to the students.

Luckily, the Collaborative's website also offers Michael Sweet's example of how to quickly form student teams according to these guidelines (see "Forming Fair Groups Quickly" halfway down the page).  In this example, the formation of the teams actually takes place in the classroom; however, the instructor has a couple of key decisions to make ahead of time.  The "sorting criteria" - that is, the characteristics that should be evenly distributed across the student teams - must be determined and prioritized in advance.  What strengths ("assets") should be distributed across teams?  What challenges ("liabilities") are best to spread out?  If students who have completed an advanced statistics course, for example, are likely to be at an advantage in the course, then identifying this as a sorting criterion and ensuring those students are evenly dispersed is important.  Likewise, if students without experience collecting data are going to be at somewhat of a disadvantage, then that experience/lack of experience should be evenly distributed as well.  Once these criteria have been identified and prioritized, then the sorting of the students and counting off into teams can commence.  This approach is likely to work best for instructors that are interested in forming (strategically) diverse teams that have an element of randomness to them so that each team has a pretty even chance at succeeding on the project or in the course.

An example 'glog' & its potential for a group project

Last week I highlighted "glogs" as a web-based option for creating digital research posters, and I have put the finishing touches on an example glog to pair with this discussion of how this could be used as a group project - one that would be especially well-suited for the active learning classrooms on the UWEC campus.

Here is a link to the glog; a screen shot is shown below for those who want to take a quick glance:

What went into glog creation?
It is worth pointing out that I found myself wishing for at least a couple of collaborators while putting together the glog over the past week!  Even though working within a group presents its own challenges, I could have used a few more brains and sets of eyes for a few of the activities that went into the glog creation, including:

• Identifying an appropriate timeline (or glimpse of a timeline, really) for the event;
• Locating coordinating images and screening video clips;
• Gleaning important background information from a variety of reports, including two lengthy reports;
• Summarizing aforementioned background information into concise statements;
• Locating appropriate data to complement the words and visuals;
• Arranging and rearranging the glog components to ensure that all of the important items would fit;
• Editing the text items to highlight certain points while maintaining some sense of consistency.

I spent approximately 6-8 hours on this glog, which is more than I initially expected since the topic is one that has routinely been a focus of discussion in my intro-level economics courses over the past few years.  In other words, I have already examined at the data, read several reports, and trolled YouTube for helpful videos - I can only imagine how long it might take someone who is new to the topic!

Ideas for a coordinating class project

Here's what I had in mind when I selected the topic for this example glog: Zimbabwe's recent episode is one of a long list of hyperinflation episodes that have occurred across time and space, so one approach would be for each group to focus on a different hyperinflation episode for their glog.  A larger objective for the class would then be to identify the basic underlying pattern for each of the hyperinflation episodes.  In other words, what are the "ingredients" of hyperinflation, so to speak, and how does this information aid our understanding of why these episodes occur?   Addressing these important questions could be a part of a discussion or a reflection paper - to be completed as a group or as individuals - that follows a digital poster-sharing session in class in which students can move around the room to ask each group questions about their particular hyperinflation episode (perhaps with pairs of team members taking turns manning their own digital poster to share and answer questions).

Options for individual accountability

Collaboration does not happen automatically (see last post about collaborative learning for more on this).  There are a number of options available to increase the chances of effective collaboration with this type of project, and there should be some form of individual accountability in order to ensure that team members are working together and sharing the workload.  One possibility is to divide up the project's tasks among the members of the group (see example list above) and ask for each component to be submitted individually - ideally, at the point in the project that it is needed - as well as for it to be incorporated into the final product.  Another option would be to require each student to complete a set of tasks individually (e.g., extract three important points from a given report, locate two images that represent the event, and identify one YouTube video that would be a good source of related information) and then have the groups meet to sort through the available options, refine, and locate additional materials, if needed.  The important step here would be for each member of the group to be held accountable for his or her share of the work, which helps to minimize the possibility of freeloaders and reduce the fear that the lack of effort by one or more group members will have a negative impact on the grades of those who do their share.

Group projects do not necessarily translate into saving time

Students should be asked to collaborate with one another when collaboration is valuable.  Groups often provide opportunities for students to capitalize on strengths and specialize; however, discussion and decision making takes time.  Horton (2012) identifies allocating sufficient time for teams to work effectively as an important aspect of designing coordinating activities: "Typically team activities take three to ten times as long as an analogous solo activity" (p.498).  This serves a reminder to be thoughtful when offering opportunities for collaborative learning.

References:
Horton, W. (2012). E-learning by design (2nd ed.). San Francisco, CA: Pfeiffer.