Group work can be both challenging and rewarding for students. In this session, three faculty members from the disciplines of sociology, engineering, and mathematics will discuss how they have successfully implemented student collaboration into their courses.
- In a sociology course, successful student collaboration involved random student-assignment to groups in Canvas (where course design incorporates UDL recommendations), task-assignments related to learning objectives, and subsequent presentations to the group. In this way, everyone was involved in small-group discussions, which sometimes addressed difficult topics. The evaluation included simple participation points for everyone fully involved.
- In an engineering design course taken in their junior year, students work in teams on a semester-long design project. Effective collaboration is one of the factors leading to a high-quality design. Students have reported that while they have the needed technical skills to work on the problem, they are unsure what it means to work effectively as a team. Teams are formed based on their responses to the CATME team-maker survey. Materials from CATME are used for three assignments. Students learn how to become more effective team members at the beginning of the semester, practice giving accurate peer evaluations and provide feedback to their teammates mid-semester, and assess each team member’s performance at the end of the semester.
- In advanced mathematics courses, students are frequently reluctant to discuss content with each other. Therefore, group-work-based computer lab assignments were added to the course to increase student engagement with each other and the course materials. The students worked collaboratively together in a computer lab to submit lab reports in a computer algebra system called Maple.