Designing Effective Group Activities: Lessons for Classroom Teaching and Faculty Development

The primary objective of this article is to provide readers with guidance for designing effective group assignments and activities for classes and workshops. In doing so, we examine the forces that foster social loafing (uneven participation) in learning groups and identify four key variables that must be managed in order to create a group environment that is conducive for broad-based member participation and learning. We then discuss the impact of various types of activities and assignments on learning and group cohesiveness. Finally, we present a checklist that has been designed to evaluate the effectiveness of group assignments in a wide variety of instructional settings and subject areas. Over the last few years group activities have become increasingly popular. However, instructors and workshop leaders frequently report three common problems that greatly reduce the effectiveness of small-group based learning activities. Two of the three problems typically occur while students or workshop participants are actually engaged in the group work. Probably the most common problem is that one or two vocal individuals often dominate the discussions to the point that quieter members’ ideas are either unexpressed or largely ignored. Alternatively, groups frequently have difficulty staying focused on the assigned task because they get side-tracked on inconsequential or irrelevant details. The third problem occurs when groups are reporting the results of their work to the total class. Even when there has been a high level of engagement in the small groups subsequent whole-class discussions sometimes “fall flat.” Based on our experience, these “problems” are actually symptoms that are almost always the result of poorly conceived group tasks. Further, we believe that all three of these problems can be avoided if classroom teachers and faculty developers use activities that are designed to take into account: 1) the developmental level of the groups in which they will be used and, 2) the impact of the activity on the cohesiveness of the groups. With this in mind, our primary objective in writing this article is to provide a set of conceptual tools to provide guidance for designing effective group assignments and activities for classes and workshops. Overall, the most important idea in the paper is that the most reliable way to gauge the learning value of group assignments is to examine their impact on group cohesiveness.