Skip to content
ADVERTISEMENT
Sign In
  • Sections
    • News
    • Advice
    • The Review
  • Topics
    • Data
    • Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
    • Finance & Operations
    • International
    • Leadership & Governance
    • Teaching & Learning
    • Scholarship & Research
    • Student Success
    • Technology
    • Transitions
    • The Workplace
  • Magazine
    • Current Issue
    • Special Issues
    • Podcast: College Matters from The Chronicle
  • Newsletters
  • Events
    • Virtual Events
    • Chronicle On-The-Road
    • Professional Development
  • Ask Chron
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Professional Development
    • Career Resources
    • Virtual Career Fair
  • More
  • Sections
    • News
    • Advice
    • The Review
  • Topics
    • Data
    • Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
    • Finance & Operations
    • International
    • Leadership & Governance
    • Teaching & Learning
    • Scholarship & Research
    • Student Success
    • Technology
    • Transitions
    • The Workplace
  • Magazine
    • Current Issue
    • Special Issues
    • Podcast: College Matters from The Chronicle
  • Newsletters
  • Events
    • Virtual Events
    • Chronicle On-The-Road
    • Professional Development
  • Ask Chron
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Professional Development
    • Career Resources
    • Virtual Career Fair
    Upcoming Events:
    Student Housing
    Serving Higher Ed
    Chronicle Festival 2025
Sign In
Teaching

In Assigning Group Work to Students, Designing the Group Comes First

By Meg Bernhard July 6, 2015

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.

To continue reading for FREE, please sign in.

Sign In

Or subscribe now to read with unlimited access for as low as $10/month.

Don’t have an account? Sign up now.

A free account provides you access to a limited number of free articles each month, plus newsletters, job postings, salary data, and exclusive store discounts.

Sign Up

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.

ADVERTISEMENT

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.”

ADVERTISEMENT

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.

ADVERTISEMENT

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.”

We welcome your thoughts and questions about this article. Please email the editors or submit a letter for publication.
Tags
Teaching & Learning
Share
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Facebook
  • Email
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT

More News

UCLA students, researchers and demonstrators rally during a "Kill the Cuts" protest against the Trump administration's funding cuts on research, health and higher education at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) in Los Angeles on April 8, 2025.
Scholarship & Research
Trump Proposed Slashing the National Science Foundation’s Budget. A Key Senate Committee Just Refused.
Illustration of a steamroller rolling over a colorful road and leaving gray asphalt in its wake.
Newly Updated
Oregon State U. Will End a Renowned Program That Aimed to Reduce Bias in Hiring
Dr. Gregory Washington, president of George Mason University.
Another probe
George Mason President Discriminated Against White People After George Floyd Protests, Justice Dept. Says
Protesters gather outside the Department of Education headquarters in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 14, 2025 to protest the Trump administrations cuts at the agency.
An Uncertain Future
The Education Dept. Got a Green Light to Shrink. Here Are 3 Questions About What’s Next.

From The Review

Photo-based illustration with repeated images of a student walking, in the pattern of a graph trending down, then up.
The Review | Opinion
7 Ways Community Colleges Can Boost Enrollment
By Bob Levey
Illustration of an ocean tide shaped like Donald Trump about to wash away sandcastles shaped like a college campus.
The Review | Essay
Why Universities Are So Powerless in Their Fight Against Trump
By Jason Owen-Smith
Photo-based illustration of a closeup of a pencil meshed with a circuit bosrd
The Review | Essay
How Are Students Really Using AI?
By Derek O'Connell

Upcoming Events

07-31-Turbulent-Workday_assets v2_Plain.png
Keeping Your Institution Moving Forward in Turbulent Times
Ascendium_Housing_Plain.png
What It Really Takes to Serve Students’ Basic Needs: Housing
Lead With Insight
  • Explore Content
    • Latest News
    • Newsletters
    • Letters
    • Free Reports and Guides
    • Professional Development
    • Events
    • Chronicle Store
    • Chronicle Intelligence
    • Jobs in Higher Education
    • Post a Job
  • Know The Chronicle
    • About Us
    • Vision, Mission, Values
    • DEI at The Chronicle
    • Write for Us
    • Work at The Chronicle
    • Our Reporting Process
    • Advertise With Us
    • Brand Studio
    • Accessibility Statement
  • Account and Access
    • Manage Your Account
    • Manage Newsletters
    • Individual Subscriptions
    • Group and Institutional Access
    • Subscription & Account FAQ
  • Get Support
    • Contact Us
    • Reprints & Permissions
    • User Agreement
    • Terms and Conditions
    • Privacy Policy
    • California Privacy Policy
    • Do Not Sell My Personal Information
1255 23rd Street, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20037
© 2025 The Chronicle of Higher Education
The Chronicle of Higher Education is academe’s most trusted resource for independent journalism, career development, and forward-looking intelligence. Our readers lead, teach, learn, and innovate with insights from The Chronicle.
Follow Us
  • twitter
  • instagram
  • youtube
  • facebook
  • linkedin