Assigning students to groups for class projects: a test of two methods

Abstract

<p>Beheshtian-Ardekani and Mahmood [1] recently proposed a method of assigning students to groups for class projects which considers a student's background, in order to achieve a balanced distribution of student skills among group members. By creating balanced groups of experienced and inexperienced students, they had assumed, but not shown, that the instructor would be giving weaker students a better chance to learn from the stronger members of a group, there would be greater synergistic learning effects, and students would be happier with the project experience. This experiment takes their approach to assign students to balanced groups using a people-sequential heuristic, then compares students' experiences with the group project against the experiences of students assigned randomly. The results show that balanced groups have a modest advantage over groups that are formed randomly. Students in balanced groups felt slightly more satisfied with and challenged by the group, and shared the workload more evenly. By comparison, students in randomly-assigned groups were much less unanimous or homogeneous in their sentiments about the quality of the group-project learning experience.</p>