Group projects and how to troubleshoot them

Although group projects are a core part of K-12 education, professors and students at UNC are questioning whether they are really beneficial in a university setting.

Like many students at UNC, junior Brooke Bekoff said she has had trouble getting group members to do their fair share of work.

“It’s very rare to be put in a group where everyone contributes equally, and usually one person ends up picking up the slack for the other team members, so it’s not really a collaborative learning experience because it’s usually one person having to do the work of four people,” she said.

Professor Keith Sawyer in the School of Education studies creativity and innovation in education with a focus on team collaboration. He said collaborative assignments should be graded by keeping both the product of the group and each individual student in mind.

“For my final team project I’m creating a Slack channel for each team, so these four people are going to work on this project. So these four people, I create for them a Slack channel, and my requirement is that I have access to that Slack channel so I’ll be able to see all of their communication among the team so I can use that to go back through and see if there’s one member of the team who never posts to Slack, they’re not going to get as many points,” he said. 

Bekoff said it is difficult for groups to find time to meet outside of class because of their conflicting schedules.

“Everyone at Carolina is super busy, and they all have very real reasons why they can’t meet at certain times because everyone’s involved in so many things, but it just becomes very difficult to find a time where everyone can meet,” she said.

Victoria Rovine, a professor in African, African-American and diaspora studies, said students should take advantage of technology to make group work easier.

“I do understand it’s very hard to find a time when everybody can meet," she said. “I think things like Google Docs and other kinds of shared documents can really facilitate group work, and I think that’s fine. I think that it’s even better if you in meet in person, but if you can’t, you have options.” 

Bekoff said that while programs like Google Docs make it easier for students to work together remotely, it is still not the same as meeting in person.

“When you’re working on Google Docs or texting, you lose a lot of the back and forth and conversation that goes along with meeting in person,” she said. “I think with that you lose a lot of the collaborative aspect of doing a group project because you’re not actually engaging with other people, and their ideas are kind of just typing out the final project.” 

Sawyer said group projects have the potential to improve student learning, but that professors should be careful about what kind of group work they assign.

“You should only assign a group project if it is an assignment that cannot be done by one person alone, so the project assignment itself must require more than one person to do it successfully,” he said. “If you get an assignment to do something in a group and you look at the assignment and say, ‘Damn I could do this by myself,’ then that’s a bad assignment.”  

@marcoquiroz10

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