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Scott Freeman and colleagues, back in 2014, published what is now a classic piece of research on active learning in higher education. It was a meta-analysis of over 200 studies that compared active learning instruction to traditional lecturing, which they refer to as continuous exposition by the teacher. The results of this meta-analysis were clear that active learning instruction led to greater student learning and greater student success over traditional lecturing.
Now, what does active learning instruction entail? Often it comes down to a lot of in-class group work, and that’s why we’re talking about it here. In order to learn, we need practice working with new ideas and concepts and skills and we need feedback on that practice, and group work can provide opportunities for both of that. Now, the feedback that students get during group work may be more from their peers than from you, the instructor, but even non-expert feedback can be super useful to the learning process. Also, there’s a lot of value in just explaining what you’re learning to someone else and helping you solidify that learning, and group work provides ample opportunities for that as well. Now, all group work isn’t the same. Just turning your students loose on a worksheet isn’t necessarily going to produce the results that you’d like.
A couple of sociologists, Jay Howard and Roberta Baird, studied student participation in whole class discussion back in the late nineties. And in their study, they found that about five to eight students account for 75 to 85% of all student comments during class-wide discussion. They used this term, consolidation of responsibility, in which a handful of students carry the load while the other students declined to participate. And subsequent research has shown that this same dynamic carries over into group work settings.
So Sarah Eddy and some colleagues published a study in 2015 examining how students social identities, their races, their gender and so on, affected their participation in small group activities in a biology course. They found that minoritised students tended to be quieter in small group discussions, not taking the same leadership roles as their peers. Their recommendation for dealing with this was structure. They recommended instructors, quote, “Structure the interactions in peer discussions to promote equal opportunities for all students to participate.” And so that’s the kind of group work that we’d like to foster is structured group work.
Now, is structured group work always the right move as a teacher? Well, not necessarily. Another group of researchers, led by Femke Kirschner in the Netherlands, studied how individuals and groups went about solving low complexity and high complexity tasks. In their 2011 study, they found that group work had little impact on student learning when it came to the low complexity tasks. But for the high complexity tasks, group work really shined in terms of helping students learn the material and kind of do so more efficiently, actually. And so, they argued that since group work does come with some trade-offs, students have to get together and kind of learn how to work with each other and there can be some friction there, it’s best to save group work for more high complexity tasks.
The research is clear: Active learning instruction leads to better student outcomes, whether that’s direct measures of learning or other measures of student success. What does active learning instruction entail? Lots of things, potentially, but it often comes down to in-class group work. To learn, our students need practice working with new ideas and they need feedback on that practice, and group work can provide both.
However, just turning your students loose on a group worksheet will not always produce good results. Social dynamics tend to produce what some researchers call a “consolidation of responsibility” in classes and in small groups in which just a few students do most of the talking. Fortunately, we can counter that dynamic with good structure, which can create more equitable and more effective group interactions.
Group work does come with trade-offs, especially the time it takes for students to get organised and get working together effectively. As a result, some researchers argue that group work should be reserved for higher complexity tasks, where learning from and with others is more useful. For lower complexity tasks, individual work time might be more appropriate.
Freeman, S., Eddy, S. L., McDonough, M., Smith, M. K., Okoroafor, N., Jordt, H., & Wenderoth, M. P. (2014). Active learning increases student performance in science, engineering, and mathematics. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(23), Article 23.
Eddy, S. L., Brownell, S. E., Thummaphan, P., Lan, M.-C., & Wenderoth, M. P. (2015). Caution, Student Experience May Vary: Social Identities Impact a Student’s Experience in Peer Discussions. CBE—Life Sciences Education, 14(4).
Howard, J. R., James, G. H., & Taylor, D. R. (2002). The Consolidation of Responsibility in the Mixed-Age College Classroom. Teaching Sociology, 30(2), 214–234.
Kirschner, F., Paas, F., & Kirschner, P. A. (2011). Task complexity as a driver for collaborative learning efficiency: The collective working-memory effect. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 25(4), 615–624.
Discussions
The “consolidation of responsibility” issue is sometimes known as the “free rider problem,” referring to the students who sit back and let other group members do all the work. What other social dynamics have you seen that make in-class group work challenging? How might you as an instructor mitigate these challenges?
Please share your thoughts and questions in the comments section below.