When assigning group work, consider the following recommendations:
- Groups should ideally have 3 students each. Fewer members risks students being stranded when a group member misses class or does not contribute. With larger groups, there can be unequal participation or no participation from some members of the group.
- Students should work in different groups during the class term. You can choose to create new groups for each assignment, or you can change the class group assignments a couple times during the class term.
- Group diversity is often an advantage. After some grades have been recorded in your class, you can easily create groups in WebAssign that use either cumulative class grade or scores on a specific assignment to pair stronger and weaker students in groups. You can manually change groups to distribute students based on other criteria not stored in WebAssign, such as age, gender or ethnicity, or to separate couples or cliques.
- Depending on the maturity of your students and their experience working in groups, you might want to assign group work as an in-class activity, so you can provide guidance and help to groups as needed.
The score for a group assignment is the same for all group members. If needed, you can change the assignment scores for individual students in the group.
Note This topic draws on the work of Roger T. and David W. Johnson of the Cooperative Learning
Center at the University of Minnesota (www.co-operation.org).
To implement this use case, see the following topics: