Instructors widely accept the benefits of assigning group work. Teamwork gives students a chance to hear multiple perspectives, and it can mirror real-world jobs, which employers like.
But recent research shows that if groups and assignments are structured hastily, they can be counterproductive. For instance, students in underrepresented groups, like women in engineering, might experience marginalization when working in teams. And there’s the “lone-wolf phenomenon,” in which one student goes off and does the group’s assignment alone, while the other students learn little.
“Students hate group work. Even faculty hate group work,” says Alison Burke, an associate professor of criminology at Southern Oregon University who has done research on how to assign group work effectively. “We like to do work ourselves,” and students want to be responsible for their own grades, she says. But “as we’re moving more and more toward needing to get our students ready for the job market,” she adds, “being able to be a team member and work in a group is extremely important.”
Data from the National Survey of Student Engagement indicates that most students worked with others on assigned projects in the past academic year. The amount varies by discipline: Engineering students participated in the most group work by far; those majoring in the arts and humanities did less.
Professors of engineering and business say group work is especially important because jobs in those fields require constant collaboration. In fact, 83 percent of employers surveyed by the Association of American Colleges and Universities said that being able to work effectively in teams was an important learning outcome.
Indeed, for any discipline, group work can be valuable. Students can challenge one another’s assumptions and work more efficiently. But too often they “focus on the product rather than the process” and “become optimizers,” says Lorelle Meadows, dean of the Pavlis Honors College at Michigan Technological University, who co-wrote a paper on gender stereotypes in engineering teams.
In order to get the best results on a project, she says, students tend to work on what they’re already good at. Professors should be proactive about constructing teams and assigning roles so that each individual achieves specified learning outcomes, she recommends.
Some fields just aren’t conducive to group collaboration. In history, for instance, students primarily do research and write, which are largely solitary tasks, notes Pamela S. Nadell, chair of American University’s history department.
And while group discussion and problem-solving can be useful in mathematics, students need to be able to figure out problems by themselves, says L. Craig Evans, a math professor at the University of California at Berkeley. “An extremely important skill is to learn, even though this is hard. And when you try, often you’ll fail,” he says. “You’ll try again and be resilient.” The value of that skill would be lost in group projects, he warns.
Avoiding Stereotypes
Professors also should pay close attention to social dynamics when assigning team-based work, says Jillian Kinzie, associate director of the National Survey of Student Engagement Institute, at Indiana University at Bloomington. Underrepresented students can often be left out of group activities and, as a result, could contribute less significant work. Members of other poorly designed groups can simply butt heads or face needless scheduling conflicts.
A group of professors on a panel at the American Society for Engineering Education’s annual conference last month warned of the challenges that students who are “negatively stereotyped as poor performers in engineering” — like women and underrepresented racial minorities — can face in group work.
Gender stereotypes, in particular, can place women on the fringes of group projects, where sometimes they do only secretary-like work, says Denise Sekaquaptewa, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and one of the panelists.
A few years ago, she and Ms. Meadows wrote the paper analyzing gender stereotypes in students’ presentations in group engineering projects. More often than not, they found, women presented the introductions or conclusions, while men presented the technical aspects of the project, whether or not they accounted for a majority of the group.
In group projects, Ms. Sekaquaptewa says, “you’re dealing not only with individual personality differences, but all of the other kinds of knowledge we have about people in terms of their social identity and their group memberships in terms of gender, race, class, nationalities.”
To mitigate the risk of problems, Ms. Kinzie says, instructors should plan out a project’s goals and be clear about them with students. “You have to be intentional in the quality of the experience,” she says, “in order to make sure students get time and space to talk, and their abilities aren’t discounted by other students because of their race.”
Additional conflicts can arise when nontraditional students are assigned to group projects. Ms. Burke, at Southern Oregon, says some of her students commute to the campus or hold demanding jobs, making it difficult to find time to schedule group meetings outside of class. She has seen students try to resolve the scheduling difficulties by conferencing online, with Skype or Google Documents.
Setting Expectations
If planning group projects is key, what does that look like?
For Matthew Ohland, an engineering professor at Purdue University at West Lafayette, the key lies in the group’s composition. For years he and other scholars have been working on a team-generator project, which allows professors at any institution to create student groups according to certain parameters — at least two women on a team, for example, or students from the same dormitories grouped together.
That way, he says, professors can reduce the possibility of marginalization and make coordination easier.
Debbie Chachra, an associate professor at Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering, says professors should frequently check in with students and observe how they interact with one another. In Olin’s first-semester engineering course for freshmen, instructors are often in the same room as the students working together on projects. That provides the instructors with the opportunity to see if any students are disengaged or, on the other hand, doing too much of the work.
It’s important to set clear expectations ahead of time, says Ms. Burke. She advises creating a rubric for students, and assessing them not only on the end product but also on the quality of their meetings and how well they communicate and collaborate with one another.
Amid all the praise for group work, Ms. Burke adds, professors shouldn’t discount the value of traditional lectures.
Students “need the foundation first before they can apply it,” she says. “It is always paramount that the lecture happens, or they get those foundational terms before they can get out and go into a group.”
