Designing a unit that includes groupwork
Constructive alignment in the unit
A successful teaching system aligns learning outcomes to the learning and teaching activities and assessment. This system is called constructive alignment (Biggs 1999: 11).
It is important that students see the connection between learning and teaching activities and assessment tasks and the unit of study learning outcomes.
Consider when planning a group task
- Specify clear learning objectives, and publish them using language all students will understand. Discuss the learning objectives when the task is allocated to students.
- Specify the task clearly by describing necessary details for students to undertake the task. Provide students with a written copy of the task specification, explain the task when it is distributed and provide opportunties for students to ask any questions. If the task specification is done effectively it will reduce the need for students to seek clarification, and will reduce the workload on lecturers and tutors.
- Clearly document the expectations of students, identifying what is necessary for them to do in terms of documenting their processes and in terms of the product required.
- Consider how the group task relates to other course activities and materials, and make that explicit to students.
- Make the task challenging, as realistic as possible, and interesting.
- Assign tasks that encourage involvement of all, interdependence and a fair division of labour.
- Decide on group size (for further information, see the Forming Groups page).
- Decide how students will divide into groups (see further information on the Forming Groups page).
- Plan sufficient time for groupwork, both in-class and out-of-class (see further information on the Managing Groups page under the heading 'As time progresses ...').
- Try to anticipate how students will approach the group-task, what you expect them to produce, and how much time you expect them to spend on the task.
- Plan an assessment approach and make it available to students (for further information, see the Assessing section).
- Plan to avoid common risks like unequal effort as well as plagiarism & collusion.
- Provide closure to the group task.
