Team Based Learning

Team Based Learning (TBL)

By Maria Helena Senger

Grupos de estudo

Helping Students Understand the Benefits of Study Groups

Maryellen Weimer, PhD

Would your students benefit from participation in a study group? Are you too busy to organize and supervise study groups for students in your courses? I’m guessing the answer to both questions is yes. If so, here are some ways teachers can encourage and support student efforts to study together without being “in charge” of the study groups. 

Promote study groups – First, include a list of reasons why students should join study groups in the syllabus or on the course website. Maybe there’s a short podcast available in which you talk about the usefulness of study groups. Better yet, if you’ve got some students who studied together in a previous course, ask them to make some comments about their experiences. Second, talk regularly in class about study groups. You can repeat all the benefits, suggest activities that involve good group study strategies, or propose some things they could study together (like problems they could solve, questions they could discuss). You also can solicit feedback from study groups in class or mention content you discussed with a group during office hours. 

Make study groups an option – Encourage students to organize their own groups, but offer to help with the process. Nudge them with reminders, such as “Send me an email if you’re interested in being part of a study group.” Have study groups “register” their members, and then report on meeting times and activities. Suggest study activities for the group (ideas like those offered in the next item). Invite the group to meet with you during office hours or to send questions electronically. Offer registered study groups that report regular meetings a bonus point incentive depending on the average of their individual test grades. Let all students know that joining a study group is an option throughout the course.

Demonstrate the value of a study group – Too often when students study together, it’s pretty much a waste of time. If they’re reviewing for a test, they talk about how it can’t possibly be that hard and thereby relieve themselves of the need to study. Or they “go over” their notes, reading what they’ve written but never with any discussion. Group studying is too often accompanied by eating, texting, and regular side conversations. 

In order for students to get the most value from their study sessions, you’ll need to help them come up with a different set of strategies. You can do so by holding a review session and asking students to form potential study groups (it’s up to them if they want to meet as a group more often). Give the groups tasks like these: 1) For three minutes everybody reviews their notes and lists five things they think will be on the test and then for five minutes they share lists and create a group list of the items most often mentioned. During the exam debrief, students revisit their list of things they expected to see on the exam. Were those things on the exam? 2) Everybody takes three minutes and writes a question about some content they don’t understand or wish they understood better. The group devotes a specified amount of time to each question, looking for relevant content in their notes and the text. 3) The group has 20 minutes to make one crib sheet that everyone in that group can use during the exam. 

Offer proof that study groups improve performance – Compare the scores, points, or grades of those working in study groups with those who aren’t. These are data which should be collected across several sections of the course.

Define study groups broadly – Students tend to think of study groups for exam preparation, but that isn’t the only kind of student collaboration that promotes learning. If there are regularly assigned readings for the course, students can get together to discuss the reading. Again you might let them do this first in class with a good set of prompts so they see how dialogue can enrich and deepen their understanding of the assigned material. Readings are easily discussed in virtual environments, which means the group doesn’t have to find a time when everybody can meet. If various writing assignments are required in the course, students can form peer editing groups. Rubrics, checklists, and prompts can help them get beyond superficial feedback (“you might need a comma here”) to the kind of helpful critique that improves the writing. 

Readers, what strategies have you used to encourage effective study groups?

Aprendizagem em pequenos grupos

Five Things Students Can Learn through Group Work

Maryellen Weimer, PhD in Teaching Professor Blog

I often get questions about group work. Recently, the question was phrased like this: “Can students learn anything in groups?” And, like faculty sometimes do, this questioner proceeded with the answer. “I don’t think my students can. When they work in groups they have no interest in doing quality work. Whatever the first person says, they all agree with that and relax into a social conversation.”

Standing opposite the experience of faculty members like this one is an accumulation of research that strongly supports students learning from and with each other in groups. There’s research and analyses of group learning now reported in virtually every discipline. Here are five things students can learn in groups, all well-established by a wide range of empirical analyses.

1. They can learn content, as in master the material. Whether they are working on problems, answering questions about the reading, or discussing case studies, when students work together on content, they can master the basics. The reason they learn is pretty straightforward, when students work with content in a group they are figuring things out for themselves rather than having the teacher tell them what they need to know.
2. They can learn content at those deeper levels we equate with understanding. I just highlighted an article for the April issue of The Teaching Professor newsletter which reported that the explanations students wrote to justify a chosen answer were stronger after just seven minutes of discussion with two or three students. When students are trying to explain things to each other, to argue for an answer, or to justify a conclusion, that interaction clarifies their own thinking and often it clarifies the thinking of other students.
3. They can learn how groups function productively. In order for groups to function productively, students must fulfill individual responsibilities. Productive group members come prepared, they contribute to the group interaction, they support each other, and they deliver good work on time. In order for individuals to function productively in groups, they have the right to expect the group to value their individual contributions, to address behaviors that compromise group productivity, and to divide the work equitably among members.
4. They can learn why groups make better decisions than individuals. Students can see how different perspectives, constructive deliberation, questioning, and critical analysis can result in better solutions and performance. If students take an exam individually and then do the same exam as a group, the group exam score is almost always higher because students share what they know, debate the answers, and through that process can often find their way to the right answer.
5. They can learn how to work with others. Group work helps students learn how to work with people outside their circle of friends, including those who have different backgrounds and experiences. They can even learn how to work with those who disagree with them, and others they might not “like” or want as friends.

Now, it is absolutely true that students don’t learn any of these things just by being put together in groups. Student attitudes about group work are often negative and that’s because they’ve been in lots of groups where they didn’t learn anything other than the fact they don’t like working in groups. Much of the group work used in college classrooms is not well designed or well managed. But when group work is carefully constructed and when teachers help students deal with those group dynamic issues that compromise group effectiveness, students can learn the content and the skills listed above.

It would also be nice to be able to end this post with a reference of a comprehensive review of research on group work. I don’t think that piece exists. Research that documents that students can learn these five things is so scattered across the disciplinary landscape that finding it all and then devising some way to quantitatively compare the results is all but impossible. But just because the findings aren’t organized or integrated does not diminish what has been documented time and again in study after study. Students can learn from and with each other in groups.