RUSTLE Really Useful Stuff on Teaching, Learning Etc.
Spring 2010
Change partners! Mixing it up in group projects. Group work is used all over campus to encourage students to work together and learn from each other, developing important skills for life. The ways that groups are formed and the sorts of tasks they carry out, however, are very varied because different forms of group work will produce different learning experiences and outcomes. The challenge is to find the sort of group activity that works best for your students and your course and this report outlines how colleagues in Informatics have done just that. Andy Philippides and Adrian Thompson convene a second year course in which students apply ideas and approaches learnt on other courses. By designing the controllers for robots that can carry out a range of tasks, students find out for themselves the advantages and disadvantages of different techniques. But time and resources are limited and there are many approaches to cover because as Andy explains ‘certain techniques will work well and certain techniques won’t, and you don’t really know until you try’. So the challenge was to come up with a course that would expose students to the widest possible range of approaches whilst giving them the time to try out techniques for themselves. It made sense to get small groups of students looking at different approaches, but that meant that they would each only be exposed to a few ideas. To get around this problem Andy and Adrian plan weekly design challenges that each build on the previous one and swap students between groups every week so that people can take the best ideas and develop them through the course. Each workshop ends with a race where the robots are tested and the winning team presents their design solution at the next session, so successful methods are shared. Students take the best ideas from the previous week and incorporate them in their designs. Andy jokes that it is a sort of ‘creative plagiarism’, but of course it is a great example of peer learning and reflects one way that design problems can be co-operatively solved in the ‘real world’.
It helps that this is a popular course which is always well attended because with this way of working continuity between sessions is important, but an extra ‘drop-in’ session with the robots allows people to catch up if they do have to miss a workshop. And although Andy believes that ‘as with all group work it does favour less able students more than the stronger ones’, responses to an evaluation questionnaire show that most of the students believe that mixing up the groups has been effective for them. One significant advantage of this type of group task is that it allows students to engage with a range of people and approaches. Each week students have to spend some time getting to know new partners and deciding on a way of working, which is good for developing ‘people skills’ and Andy noticed that ‘people got to know each other a lot better – you could see them getting along’. Working with a range of peers was something the students valued too, with one commenting that it was ‘nice to … meet all the people on the course as I did not actually know them all before … good to get a totally different view on how to solve problems each week’. Working with different people and learning from the most successful team each week meant that ‘some really nice ideas percolated through to the final designs’. However, there is a price to pay for these benefits. It takes time to get up to speed with a new partner so, for more complex tasks, groups could be kept together longer. This mode of group activity would not be effective in all situations, but if you have a course that requires students to experience and evaluate a range of approaches and can design a task that builds week on week it might be something that would work for you and your students. If you have an interesting way of using group work that you would like to share with colleagues why not talk to RUSTLE about it?
Also in this issue Students Building a Learning Community A New Perspective with Peer Observation Podcasting and Lecture Capture Question Banks Peer Assisted Learning The History Subject Centre Spring Teaching & Learning Events
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