Options for group forming/selection

The following criteria are recommended for team formation (Felder & Brent, n.d.:7-8) :

1. Form teams of 3–4 students for most tasks. When students work in pairs, the diversity of ideas and approaches that leads to many of the benefits of cooperative learning may be lacking. In teams of five or more, some students are likely to be inactive unless the tasks have distinct and well-defined roles for each team member.
2. Make the teams heterogeneous in ability level. The unfairness of forming a group with only weak students is blatant, but groups with only strong students are equally undesirable. The members of such teams are likely to divide up the homework and communicate only cursorily with one another, avoiding the interactions that lead to most of the proven benefits of cooperative learning. In heterogeneous groups, the weaker students gain from seeing how better students approach problems, and the stronger students gain a deeper understanding of the subject by teaching it to others.
3. If the assignments require work being done outside class, form teams whose members have common blocks of time to meet during the week.
4. When students in a particular demographic category are historically at risk for dropping out, do not isolate members of that category in a team. Students belonging to at-risk populations are also at risk of being marginalised or adopting passive roles when they are isolated in teams. Once they reach the third year, however, they are very likely to graduate. The focus should then shift to preparing them for the professional world where no one will be protecting them, and so this criterion may be dropped.

There are a few possible ways to get the information needed to form teams using these rules, including:

1. Let students self-select into groups, stipulating that no group may have more than one student who earned A’s in one or two specified prerequisite courses. While not perfect, this system at least assures that the very best students in the class do not cluster together, leaving the weaker ones to fend for themselves.
2. Use Team Maker^®, an on-line team-forming instrument developed at the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. The students enter the requested information into a database, the instructor specifies the sorting criteria, and Team Maker^® does the sorting. Sorting with Team Maker^® tends to be more reliable and much faster than manual sorting.
3. On the first day of class, have the students fill out a survey containing several questions and an hour-by-hour matrix of the week. On the form, the students write their grades in selected prerequisite courses, times they are not available to meet outside class with their teams, and, if the criterion related to at-risk minorities is to be used, their gender and ethnicity. Use the surveys to form the groups, following the guidelines given above and using grades in prerequisite courses as the measure of ability.
4. iPeer also has a "team maker" functionality based on survey questions created by the lecturer. The system create the groups according to the answers of the students. The lecturer has the opportunity to view these groups and make adjustments where appropriate.