My Groups -- Not very successful

The Partnership for 21st Century Skills http://www.21stcenturyskills.org/index.php has identified several skill areas which students (K-12 but this can be useful for college students as well) should have to be successful in today’s world. The Learning and Innovation Skills area, (skills which should prepare students for a complex work environment), lists “creativity and innovation; critical thinking and problem solving; communication and collaboration” skills.

With that in mind, I occasionally attempt simple group project in one or more of my classes. This time my attempt was less than successful with only one out of four groups actually collaborating and communicating with each other.

For my group project, I created four discussion groups where students peer reviewed each other’s database design, asked questions, posted suggestions and basically helped each other come up with a good design for their Case Study. It has worked nicely in the past and I receive much better assignments when students have peer reviewed each other’s work prior to submitting their files. They receive 10 points for posting their design and helping each other.

It takes a little bit of work on your part to set up the groups and the group activities. D2L considers a group discussion as a place for students to discuss a problem and not really a gradeable item for the gradebook. When you try to grade that discussion by attaching the groups to a grade column, D2L creates a grade column for every group. For the groups where the individual student does not participate, they are graded with a zero which makes it very confusing for students. My work-around for this gradebook issue was to include the participation points in the rubric for their individual database design assignment. That way there was no extra gradebook column.

My students had over a week to work in their groups. Their individual assignments were not based on contributions from any other group member. They just had to help each other. According to 21st century skills, collaboration is a skill which should be incorporated in academic work to help prepare students for the workforce. And technically, no person really works in a vacuum without anyone else. So why the poor response? I have no answer for this question but I will try it again.