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Assigning Students to Groups for Engineering Design Projects: A Comparison of Five Methods
Author(s) -
Brickell Lt Col James L.,
Porter Lt Col David B.,
Reynolds Lt Col Michael F.,
Cosgrove Capt Richard D.
Publication year - 1994
Publication title -
journal of engineering education
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.896
H-Index - 108
eISSN - 2168-9830
pISSN - 1069-4730
DOI - 10.1002/j.2168-9830.1994.tb01113.x
Subject(s) - citation , engineering , art history , library science , history , political science , law , computer science
More recently, researchers such as Bruffee, and Johnson and Johnson have explored the positive contributions groups can make to education in much greater detail. Porter asserts that to be its best, education must become a team sport. The Harvard Assessment Seminars found particularly strong support for the use of groups in higher education. How group assignments should be made to optimize student learning is far from clear. Numerous methods of group assignments can be used, ranging from allowing the students to select their own groups to the instructor making the group assignments using a variety of different criteria. This paper presents the results of an investigation into the effectiveness of group performance using five different methods of assigning students to work groups. The investigation took place at the United States Air Force Academy during the Fall semester 1991, and involved a core course taught by the Academy’s Department of Civil Engineering, CE 310, “Air Base Design and Performance.” In Civil Engineering 310 students work on course projects in groups. Before this study, there were no standards for assigning students to these groups; it was left to each individual instructor’s discretion, wondering if certain methods of selecting groups might be more effective than others.