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There’s a meme that often goes around of a pie-chart showing the main things people learn from group work; by far the largest slice of the pie is “TRUST NO-ONE”. Many students dread group projects. But, you know what? So do many teachers. We dread having to deal with tricky interpersonal dynamics, and most of us aren’t trained in running group therapy. But group work has its place in education, and so today we want to talk about some tools that can help you manage it, and the research behind them.

Putting Students Into Groups

Here are some frequently asked questions about forming groups:

Should you let students choose their own groups, or pick groups for them?

Although it might be tempting to just let students pick their own groups, research shows that groups for students is almost always more optimal than letting them choose their own, or using random assignment (1, 2).

What’s the most important factor to consider when forming groups?

If the groups are supposed to work on projects outside of class, the most important factor to consider is actually scheduling. If you group students by availability, they can’t later complain that they couldn’t find a time to meet. See below for a tool that helps you do this.

Should you make groups as diverse as possible?

The answer to this one may be surprising: research on minority students (3) and women (4) suggests that such students do better when they are not outnumbered by dominant/majority groups. This is another factor that the tools below can take into account in their team-creation algorithms.

What’s the best way to go about creating groups?

While of course you can form groups manually, here are two similar apps that automate the process and make it much smoother:

CATME Team-Maker

This researcher-run tool gathers information from students through an online survey, and uses evidence-based algorithms (2) to group students. As the teacher, you control which factors are weighted most heavily in the algorithm. The suggestion is to group students by similar schedules, gender, and race (see above), and dissimilar on all other factors (e.g., GPA, and various types of skills), but you can play with these settings and also exclude any questions that you feel are not relevant (see here for all the questions included in the survey).