Coordinating and facilitating group work can be challenging. When you have a group project planned for your course, one of the first hurdles is figuring out how to divide students into groups. Instructors have relied on two common ways of forming groups: allowing students to select their own groups or creating completely randomized groups. Both options present different and nuanced logistical hurdles.
FeedbackFruits’ Group Formation tool empowers instructors to allocate students to groups based on more practical or meaningful criteria—such as when they are available to meet or the strengths they bring to the project—by asking students to respond to a brief survey. Students can be grouped based on similarities or dissimilarities and each question can be weighted separately.
Instructors have noticed a few key benefits, including:
- Creating groups that are more balanced, whereby membership is intentional.
- Time is saved—no more manually organizing and setting up groups individually!
- Once the groups are created, they are synced to Brightspace and available to use in other Brightspace tools (e.g. Brightspace assignments, other FeedbackFruits activities).
Use Case Spotlight: Using the Group Formation Tool to Prepare for a Group Project
As part of a class project, your students need to work together in groups to outline, research, script, record and edit an audio assignment. To form groups that can work together effectively, you might set up a Group Formation survey with questions like this:
- “What day of the week are you available to meet with your group?”
- For this question the answers would include the days of the week. You would group students similarly so that all the group members are available and ready to work on the same days.
- “How much experience do you have recording or editing audio?”
- The answers to this question would include options like none, a small amount, a moderate amount or a lot. You may want to group students dissimilarly here, so that each group has a mix of students with different experience levels.
- “What skills and strengths do you bring to the team?”
- Answers would include options like organization, writing, editing, communication or structure and planning. For this question you would group students dissimilarly, making sure that each group will have students with a range of strengths and skills.
By including questions aimed at both practical considerations and group dynamics, and then combining that with question weighting that prioritizes the most important factors, you can easily set up customized groups.
Some Practical Tips for Success with the Group Formation Tool
- Create your survey well ahead of the project start date and give students ample time to complete it.
- Make sure that the Group Formation activity closes with enough time for you to make any additional changes needed to the groups before the project commences.
- Group formation only works when students actually complete the survey. If students do not complete the survey, they end up being grouped with other non-responders. Let them know that this will happen and encourage students to fill out the survey so that they have the best chance at working with a compatible group.
- Keep your survey brief and purposeful. Surveys that are too long (i.e., more than five questions) can lead to survey fatigue and incomplete surveys.
- Cover key areas like availability, learning goals or collaboration preferences. This will help your group formation be powerful and deliberate without being overwhelming.
There are nine different FeedbackFruits activities available for you to explore, and all activities are focused on making student collaboration easier and scalable. You can add or create FeedbackFruits activities in Brightspace by clicking on the Existing Activities button.
If you’d like help or want to learn more about how you can use FeedbackFruits in your course, reach out to Teaching and Learning Services via the FeedbackFruits link in our TLS Support Portal.
We’ll highlight another use case next month!