
Incentivizing healthy group dynamics in classes (2012) - luu
http://blogs.oregonstate.edu/glencora/2012/12/04/incentivizing-healthy-group-dynamics-in-classes/
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red_admiral
I've recently been on a seminar about this and it contained one of the least
useful pieces of advice I've heard for a while: "consider the impact on
minorities of how students are assigned to groups". Useless because there's a
real issue here but absolutely no information on _how_ to do this, e.g. good
or bad examples.

I spoke to someone who's been doing group work for a while and she gave the
following more useful advice: if you have a class with say 10% women, pick the
groups yourself as instructor, never let the students do it all on their own.
You want to avoid both "the women's group" (they all self-sort into one group)
and "the one woman in the group, who is instantly elected group secretary".

I'd be interested to hear people's perspectives on this.

Regarding the "slackers" issue, there's a whole "methodology" called Team-
Based Learning ([https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/team-based-
learn...](https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/team-based-learning/))
that has thoughts on how to address this. In their opinion, as far as I
understand it, you make mixed-ability groups but you also test people
individually. One way is to give all group members an individual multiple-
choice test on the pre-reading that you set, at the start of the session, and
then collect the results and have a look through them while the groups work on
their first task.

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lostdog
In college, the best time I had on group projects was when I could pick my
group. I was in groups of people with a similar skill level and interest in
the topic, and we worked together seamlessly. I learned the most because other
group members had ideas that I didn't think of. Since we were all really
interested in the subject, we would also go above and beyond the assignment
guidelines and turn in work that had challenged us even more.

The worst groups had extreme skill and interest differences. It always took
10x the time to drag the lower-skill person through their part of the project
than it took to do the work myself. In the beginning I would spend a lot of
time helping the person, but in later projects I would just lay out some
interfaces early on, leave the person to figure it out themselves, and reserve
enough time before the due date for me to just do their part myself if
necessary. I can't imagine that this was fun for them. I think they would have
gotten much more out of being on a team with someone at a similar level of
skill. They would have had someone to talk problems through with, and would
have had some camaraderie around struggling their way through the course. I
was never on a team with someone much-much better than me, but I don't think I
would have found that fun either.

In the best teams, you are slightly better at some things and slightly worse
at others. When these differences become too great, working in a group is no
longer helpful. I also feel like the dynamics and incentives in a job differ
from the dynamics and incentives of a college group project that you don't
really learn any useful social skills either.

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evdev
I got burned doing 80-90% of the four-person semester-long software
engineering lab.

I think it boils down very simply: the intra-group dynamics can't be opaque to
whatever mechanism regulates the group. Hence making the group dynamics
unknown to the instructor but not providing group members some other mechanism
does not work.

Letting students punish/fire each other would just open up lots of other ways
of things being unfair that would need their own mitigations. (In the real
world this takes the form, very imperfectly, of a boss' incentive alignment
and employee exit.)

I think the only reasonable answer is to not make individual contribution
opaque to the instructor. Git/etc (for code and documentation) may be your
friend here.

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ketzo
Based on my college experience, it feels like “divide a class into groups that
won’t murder each other” might be the great unsolved problem of our era.

~~~
retiredcoder
My time in college also taught me a lot on groups. It soon became clear that
an A team is very volatile because of egos and motivators are hardly the same.
Every time we had groups bigger than 2-3, there was drama and/or resentment. I
wish I knew more about people and project management at that time but times
were also different..

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bashbjorn
I'm currently studying a CS(-ish) bachelors degree (and I'm currently
procrastinating on a group assignment) so I have some experience with this.

Our uni gives us quite a lot of group assignments. The university-wide
solution to this problem is to include a mandatory section in each group
assignment, where we are supposed describe the specific contributions of
individual groupmembers. This is a neat idea in theory, but it doesn't really
work. Because we've almost always lied in this section.

You'd think that the more productive student would want to claim their own
work, but more often we've prioritized 'sticking together', and aimed for
distributing the described workload as evenly as possible. The idea being that
the highest grade wouldn't be higher anyway (the report doesn't magically
become better), but it might give the grader incentive to give some group
members a lower grade.

It's not a zero-sum game. So we might as well sacrifice some pride to keep the
group dynamic strong, and to help out weaker students (regardless of whether
it's a work-ethic or an intelligence problem).

That being said - we might be an unusual social group. We generally prioritize
technical (and social) abilities way higher than grades (which aren't so
important here anyway). We've all stuck together since the start of our
studies, despite being a very wide span of academic ability - so theres a lot
of teaching and learning within the group.

A survey of our uni recently ranked our line of study #1 for "How motivating
the social life is to performing academically". So it seems that our approach
is working.

EDIT: I should mention that it's by no means the case that the actual
workloads are distributed evenly. They are of course very skewed, and often a
single group member will do almost no work.

~~~
im3w1l
You know that the higher achieving person could have told the truth, but
didn't. This might change the situation from a smug feeling of having cheated
the hard worker into a feeling of gratitude that they protected you. The power
they wield is the difference between a philantrope and a sucker.

Just a thought.

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remir
I like the point where the slackers would be forced to work with other
slackers because for some of them, this is the only way to motivate them to
build a sense of responsibility and urgency.

If they can't, then they fail and this will be a learning experience that
would be very valuable for them.

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pkaye
Back when I was in college in a database class, they professor asked us to
divide into groups of 2-3. Many people didn't know each other so it was hit or
miss. Inevitably one person in the group carried the weight of projects but
everyone in the team got the same score. At the finals there was a twist
because the exam questions were derived from details in the the team projects.
If you actually worked on the project, that was easy to recall. Everyone else
had a pretty hard time.

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neves
I like this article from Barbara Oakley:

Group Hitchhikers & couch Potatoes -
[https://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs3110/2018fa/teams/hitch...](https://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs3110/2018fa/teams/hitchhikers.html)

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plake
I never understood why some colleges set group work, it seems like such an
obviously terrible way to evaluate people. Good students will end up doing all
the work, and if you try to change that, the good students will lie about it
to appease you.

You can just set individual projects, it's not that hard.

~~~
msg3
Putting students into groups reduces the marking load by the number of
students in the group. I teach a course with >100 students - grading 25
reports is manageable, where as grading 100 is not.

There are some good pedagogic reasons for group work too - most people do end
up working with others, so getting some practice makes sense.

~~~
jerf
I have never in my career been set into a group of people with semi-random
distributions of skill in the relevant task, totally unknown to me at the
outset, with _no management structure_ either in place, or available, where we
are all nominally peers responsible for equal portions of the task, with the
knowledge that the group has no future and its only deliverable (ultimately)
is a grade.

The resulting experiences were not all that helpful.

I've worked in almost every conceivable structure since then; with people more
skilled than me in some things, less skilled in some things, above me in the
org chart, below me, way off to the side, in other companies entirely, in
small groups, in large groups, startups, established corporations,
heterogeneous skills and fairly homogeneous (as much so as it ever gets, of
course). In all those situations, I would have to say for all their
pathologies and successes, none of them have ever even slightly resembled my
college experience with "group work".

In engineering we are not in the habit of taking 4 people fresh from a job
interview, putting them all in a cubicle, providing them no distinction
amoungst themselves in responsibility, and handing them a collective task. Any
manager worth their salt would take one look at such a "management" structure
and instantly tell you how there's virtually no chance of success there. It is
so obviously flawed that I really don't see the point of doing it for the
purpose of "working in groups". I don't know if "working in groups" is even
_possible_ to really test for in the college situation, but it certainly is
going to take more work than drawing names from a hat and calling it a day.

I can't think of a way to avoid the fact that there's no way to resolve
conflicts because the situation is just too darned symmetric. I don't even
mean acrimonious conflicts necessarily, but any difference of opinion no
matter how emotional or not. It's not even about simple "authority"; in a real
work environment, someone may be the one who is going to own the support, or
has years of experience with the relevant systems, or may be junior in other
ways but has a ton of experience in this particular thing... in the real world
there's almost always _some_ way to resolve these things long before it gets
to any sort of real conflict. These artificial groups don't have anything,
though. They're set up to explode in exactly the way that so many of us,
including me, experienced.

The only symmetry-breaker is "who cares most about the grade" and the totally
rational game-theoretic solution is "let them do the work then". What else is
there in the general case?

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spenrose
The Software/Data Carpentries focus intensely on these matters, and their
founder Greg Wilson continues to work on them:

[https://carpentries.org](https://carpentries.org)

[http://third-bit.com](http://third-bit.com)

