Where individual skills are collectively integrated into a group
Answers
Answer:
What are the challenges of group work and how can I address them?
Unfortunately, groups can easily end up being less, rather than more, than the sum of their parts. Why is this?
In this section, we consider the hazards of group projects and strategies instructors can use to avoid or mitigate them. Find other strategies and examples here or contact the Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence for help.
For students, common challenges of group work include:
Coordination costs
Motivation costs
Intellectual costs
For instructors, common challenges involve:
Allocating time
Teaching process skills
Assessing process as well as product
Assessing individual as well as group learning
Challenges for students
Coordination costs represent time and energy that group work consumes that individual work does not, including the time it takes to coordinate schedules, arrange meetings, meet, correspond, make decisions collectively, integrate the contributions of group members, etc. The time spent on each of these tasks may not be great, but together they are significant.
Coordination costs can’t be eliminated, nor should they be: after all, coordinating the efforts of multiple team members is an important skill. However, if coordination costs are excessive or are not factored into the structure of group assignments, groups tend to miss deadlines, their work is poorly integrated, motivation suffers, and creativity declines.
Instructors should note that coordination costs increase with:
Group size: The more people in the group, the more schedules to accommodate, parts to delegate, opinions to consider, pieces to integrate, etc. Smaller groups have lower coordination costs.
Task interdependence: Tasks in which group members are highly reliant on one another at all stages tend to have higher coordination costs than tasks that allow students to “divide and conquer”, though they may not satisfy the same collaborative goals.
Heterogeneity: Heterogeneity of group members tends to raises coordination costs, especially if there are language issues to contend with, cultural differences to bridge, and disparate skills to integrate. However, since diversity of perspectives is one of the principle advantages of groups, this should not necessarily be avoided.
Strategies: To help reduce or mitigate coordination costs:
Keep groups small.
Designate some class time for group meetings.
Use group resumes or skills inventories to help teams delegate subtasks.
Assign roles (e.g., group leader, scheduler) or encourage students to do so.
Point students to digital tools that facilitate remote and/or asynchronous meetings.
Warn students about time-consuming stages and tasks.
Actively build communication and conflict resolution skills.
Designate time in the project schedule for the group to integrate parts.
Motivation costs refers to the adverse effect on student motivation of working in groups, which often involves one or more of these phenomena:
Free riding occurs when one or more group members leave most or all of the work to a few, more diligent, members. Free riding – if not addressed proactively – tends to erode the long-term motivation of hard-working students.
Social loafing describes the tendency of group members to exert less effort than they can or should because of the reduced sense of accountability (think of how many people don’t bother to vote, figuring that someone else will do it.) Social loafing lowers group productivity.
Conflict within groups can erode morale and cause members to withdraw. It can be subtle or pronounced, and can (but isn’t always) the cause and result of free riding. Conflict – if not effectively addressed – can leave group members with a deeply jaundiced view of teams.
Strategies: To address both preexisting and potential motivation problems:
Explain why working in groups is worth the frustration.
Establish clear expectations for group members, by setting ground rules and/or using team contracts.
Increase individual accountability by combining group assessments with individual assessments.
Teach conflict-resolution skills and reinforce them by role-playing responses to hypothetical team conflict scenarios.
Assess group processes via periodic process reports, self-evaluations, and peer evaluations.