One of the standard axioms in higher education is that students hate group work. While there may be some truth to that statement, I think the more accurate version is that students hate poorly designed and structured group work.
Admittedly, one of the most challenging parts of teaching is the use of group assignments and teamwork in our classes. Instructors use group work for a variety of reasons—reducing the number of projects that need grading, helping students learn from each other’s strengths, or teaching teamwork skills valued in the field—but the fact remains that this approach is tough for everyone involved.
Part of this challenge arises because of the difficulty in structuring and managing teams. Students don’t have the experience to do this themselves, and many of us lack the expertise and/or time to teach them effective teamwork practices.
That’s where a piece of software called CATME comes in. CATME (Comprehensive Assessment of Team Member Effectiveness) is a system of web-based tools that support instructors in managing student teams. CATME includes a tool for assigning students to teams based on a variety of adjustable criteria, a tool to train them to work effectively in teams, a peer evaluation tool that allows them to rate teammates’ contributions to group projects, and a tool to train them to do this peer evaluation in effective and consistent ways. And best of all, this is all based on empirical research about behaviors associated to successful teamwork.
The CITL has purchased a campus-wide license for CATME for 2019-20, so all IUB faculty members can sign up to use CATME in their classes. We will be developing workshops about CATME—and team-based learning more broadly—during the fall semester. And we would be interested in hearing about your uses of this tool in your courses, so please let us know how CATME has impacted your use of group projects.
Know colleagues who have struggled with group activities? Suggest CATME as a possible tool to manage the teamwork, while the CITL can help with larger assignment design. More on CATME is available at http://info.catme.org/.
I have used CATME with success over 3 semesters in a small course (class sizes ranged from 24-40 students) that mixed together Graduate students with Senior-level Undergraduate students. This class focused on reading and interpreting biology primary literature (i.e., research articles), and group work allowed students to do most of the delving and interpreting in a hands-on way.
My two largest goals in making groups for this particular course were as follows: 1) to spread out the graduate students and the undergraduates with laboratory-based research experience since these students would have more practice with the language and experimental learning barriers in this course, and 2) to separated students based upon their preferred leader/follower roles to lower conflict and maximize speaker/listener discussions. CATME could take this information from students and then automatically scramble to build these groups. It’s certainly something I could have done by hand, but the real power of CATME came when collecting peer-evaluations later on.
CATME has built-in assessments to detect for/against biases to help you identify inappropriate weighting in their peer-based grades. Many of these ‘flagged’ grades were expected from my observing group dynamics in class, and seeing that CATME could identify them without this first-hand knowledge highlighted the sensitivity of using this system for group work.
Based upon this previous experience with CATME in my in-class groups, I would feel confident using it for out-of-class group work too.