My Notes
Categories
Asking students to work in groups and developing group projects is always challenging. This 5-slides about describes approaches for increasing the effectiveness and success of student groups. It also contains some helpful links to resources on how to form groups and help students develop group skills.
This Powerpoint is a bare bones introduction to student learning groups. People who view it will learn that:
1. Setting up student groups should be intentional – we know some things about this
2. Students need to learn how to be good group members
3. Group activities should be designed in order to maximize group success
The Powerpoint can simply be "read" if faculty want to learn more about groups, or it could serve as the foundation for giving a presentation on student learning groups. However, it is mostly text and needs more images and fewer words if it's going to be used in a presentation.
Evaluation
I used a version of this in a workshop for summer research students who are developing curricula for general chemistry laboratories and for supplemental instruction groups. It will be interesting to see if the students incorporate any of these ideas into their work.
There are no evaluation results yet, other than the fact that the workshop particpants found the presentation interesting and they had many good questions.
Here's a link to an article about research from University of Georgia suggesting some useful statements students can make that elicit good group reasoning. And here's the link to the original LSE article. For example, asking for clarification is good: "I don't understand, could you please explain?" And metacognitive statements such as "Does our answer address the question?" There's more good stuff in the paper. We can help students do this!
And here's another more thorough take on the "roles" described in this LO.