Ledlow: After you've prepared your students for the idea that they will be working in groups or you've given them a little sample, then, if you're ready to move on to using formal cooperative task groups or base groups, how do you go about forming teams? What are some of your criteria?

Smith: Carefully and thoughtfully! Often the worst that one can do is say "I want you to work in groups, go out and find one another." The size varies all over the place, people choose their friends-which is wonderful that the students have friends but often they don't make the best task partners. And so if you don't want to invest a lot of time in learning more about the students and their strengths and weaknesses and skills etc, then random is seen as fair by many students. It's quick and you get equal-sized groups, so many faculty use random. Another strategy is to use stratified random, where, if there's some skill or background or experience that you know is going to be helpful, to stratify along that and then distribute those folks around to the various groups.

With base groups, some faculty let students express a preference. They say, "Note anyone that you'd like to work with," and then they'll pair people with one person they like to work with and then randomly assign them to another. So they get one person they want to work with, and then they meet some new people. So there are a whole bunch of ways of forming groups; most of them require learning something about the students. Some faculty use learning styles and then try to make balanced groups around learning styles. The key I think is for the faculty member to take responsibility for forming the groups. Some of the research that has been done on this indicates that the groups that perform the best are ones where there's a common interest-they're really interested in the topic or the project-and they are otherwise heterogeneous.                           

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