‘PROJECT GROUP’ WORK IN BIOLOGY

Students who participate in small class learning groups tend to improve their understanding and retention of the subject matter, and also tend to be more satisfied with their classes.1 Various names and styles fall under this type of learning, including cooperative learning, learning communities, peer teaching, team learning, study groups and work groups.2

Pedagogical theory suggests that the group dynamic releases students from the “tyranny” of the traditional lecture, forcing them to rely more on their own and their peers’ thought processes.3 Thus a major advantage of group work is that it creates an environment for active learning.

Faculty members in the Hostos Natural Sciences Department have introduced group activity into their classes in order to capture its pedagogical benefits. The results are generally favorable, but of course every silver lining has its cloud. In this note we report on our initial experiences with one type of group work—“project groups”—in two Biology courses. Our hope is that this report will be of interest to Hostos faculty in the sciences as well as in other disciplines.

GROUP WORK TYPOLOGIES

Group work can be divided into two general types—learning groups and project groups—which are distinguishable by the time required to accomplish the task. Learning groups focus on short-term assignments, and project groups focus on more complex long-term projects.4

Learning Groups

This category includes short-term assignments which range from activities done in the classroom that last for a few minutes, to tasks that may last for a couple of weeks and will likely require out-of-class work. Learning groups may be informal or formal in nature.

An informal learning group has a very limited goal, which is achieved within a single class session, and is typically ungraded. For example, a teacher who tells a class to organize into groups of four students, to discuss a concept or question for a few minutes, is using one form of informal learning group. Common types of informal learning groups include buzz groups, think-pair-share, jigsaw, and rotating trios.5

A formal learning group has a more ambitious goal, involving completion of a more complex task, such as carrying out a lab experiment, or writing a brief report or paper. The task can be completed in a single class session or over a few weeks, and is typically graded. Although a formal learning group may contain the same student members throughout the semester, the collective work done on each assignment is relatively limited. A study group—such as a team of four students who cooperates throughout the semester on reading and homework assignments, and on review and exam preparation—can be considered to be a formal learning group. York College implemented just such a study group program in a General Education biology course for non-majors.6

Project Groups

This category includes long-term assignments or projects that students work on for a major part of the semester, and that require sustained effort in order to create a substantive work product, such as a long paper or a video. Project groups are inherently formal groups. Significant out-of-class cooperation is needed from each team member to plan, discuss, share ideas, create the work product, and carry out the final editing. The individual and group components are assessed and graded.

“PROJECT GROUP” WORK IN BIOLOGY

Although educational benefits should accrue from all forms of group work, long- term substantial collaborative assignments—i.e., project group work activities—are particularly well-suited to biology, where the focus is on a combination of scientific concepts and a dense set of facts. For this reason, we decided to incorporate “project group” activities into two of our courses: Biology I and Anatomy & Physiology I.7

The project group activities are designed to stimulate a deeper understanding of biology through “peer teaching” and “active learning.” Even though course content differences and instructor predilections have led to very different kinds of assignments in the two courses, the underlying structure and goals of both assignments are similar, and therefore the benefits and problems that we have encountered are similar. In the following account we describe the techniques we have tried, our observations on student dynamics and problematical areas, and our tentative conclusions about the pedagogical advantages and disadvantages of project group work in biology.

Research Paper and Oral Presentation (General Biology I; Henderson)

Over the course of the past several semesters, students taking General Biology I (BIO 210) have formed project groups of four to five members who work cooperatively on an assigned theme during the entire course.

The theme for each group is broad. The nature of the research project requires each group to divide their theme into sections, as suggested by a “guide questionnaire.” Students are expected to have the basic knowledge and skills to handle the work. They need to be familiar with library research strategies, and they are advised to take library workshops such as “Finding Articles” or “Keys to Database Searching and Plagiarism.” After these basic elements are fulfilled, the groups are free to organize the teams, arrange meeting times, and apportion work among team members. At the end of the semester each group presents the results of their work as a scientific research paper and as an oral presentation in front of a large audience.

Three strategies have been tried in forming the student teams: random assignment, assignment according to the pre-existing laboratory groups, and assignment by student-selected affinity groups. The outcomes in student performance from these three strategies do not differ significantly—none of these strategies eliminate inherent problematical aspects of this type of cooperative endeavor. Project group work is apparently not an activity that students adapt to easily. The level of complaints increases as the semester advances, the deadline looms, and teams discover that they have not made sufficient progress.

Several problems recur frequently in the project groups. The students often have a problem agreeing on mutually convenient meeting times. A second problem is the un- equal distribution of work: in each group some students, generally the most organized, get stuck with most of the work while the other members simply “dump” unedited and undigested research in the laps of the “organizers,” who are expected to do all of the work to shape the final project. A third problem is attrition: when team members withdraw from the course, they often do not take responsibility for passing on their work information to the rest of the group. The result is a gap in the structure of the research piece, which the remaining members must correct by re-distributing the work assignments.

Two strategies have been implemented in Biology I to improve the dynamic of group work and to ensure that every student is graded fairly. First, students must submit research logs as part of their individual assignments. Research logs document the research strategies used by each student, including the date that they found each re- source, and a paragraph describing how the student will incorporate the resource into their portion of the research project. The student research logs are evaluated on the basis of the quantity and quality of the reviewed documents—refereed sources have more grade value than non-refereed sources. Second, each student submits a confidential “peer-evaluation” document to the instructor every three or four weeks. In this document, students have an opportunity to provide open-ended feedback on the project and to assign points to their teammates for punctuality, contribution to research and group work, and interpersonal attitude. The “peer-evaluation” grade is incorporated into the teacher’s overall assignment grade for each student.

Instructional Video (Anatomy & Physiology I; Ostrin)

This past semester, a “jumbo” Anatomy & Physiology I class of fifty students was divided into teams of four students, and each team was assigned a specific course topic on which to create a three-minute video.8 The topics covered most of the course syllabus, ranging from atomic structure through the human musculature.9 Each group had six weeks to work on the video assignment and produce a final polished video to be shown during the departmental Open House, before a large audience comprised of their fellow classmates, departmental faculty, and other interested students.

There were several pedagogical rationales for this project. First, the group dynamic necessary to create each video would stimulate active learning and increase understanding. Second, the increased social interaction and “fun” generated by the project would give the students a more positive view of the course and lead to greater engagement and achievement. Third, the video products collectively produced by the class teams would be posted on the Web for students to review the major concepts covered during the semester, thereby enhancing long-term information retention.10

Students were assigned to teams based on their pre-existing laboratory positions, where they sit at lab tables in groups of four. Early in the semester these teams work as formal learning groups to carry out experiments and write laboratory reports that are due the following week. Because lab team members had already worked together successfully, it made sense, therefore, to use these “natural” lab group formations for the video project as well.

There was some concern that some teams would lack either the hardware (cam- era or computer) or the technical savvy to carry out this ambitious digital project. However, a technological skills survey of the class showed that most students owned computers and the digital cameras needed to create the videos, and were comfortable with computer hardware and software. Thus, there was no pressing need to modify the lab teams for technical reasons.

Once the video topics were distributed to the class, each team’s first meeting was devoted to allocating the different steps or “jobs” in the video—i.e., outlining, script- writing, storyboarding, acting, props, shooting the video, editing, titles and credits. Responsibility for allocating the jobs was left entirely up to each group: every team member was to be given a primary individual job that would be graded individually, as well as a team-wide responsibility for the overall success of the video that would receive a “group grade.”11

Problematical aspects of the cooperative endeavor emerged, just as it did in the Biology I project described above.12

One major problem was the “free rider” student, a team member who contributed little, but benefited from the work (and the grade) of the rest of the team. The project was designed to prevent free riders—by asking individual students to be responsible for, and to put their names on, the outline, script, storyboard, etc.—but in practice it became difficult to tease out the work of each individual. Students felt most comfortable working in two’s or three’s on each aspect of the project, perhaps because the video-making project was ambitious, novel, and necessarily collaborative. As a result, even though it appeared to the teacher that some students had not contributed their share of the work, it was not possible to establish that fact with certainty. Students tended not to complain to the teacher about “free-riders” on their team, preferring to shoulder the work themselves rather than “snitch” on their fellow students.13

A second problem was the “no-show” student, a team member who did no work because of illness, procrastination, absence or withdrawal from the course, or inter- personal conflict.14 Video project jobs need to be done in a logical order—i.e., first the outline, followed by the script, the storyboard, shooting the video, and finally the editing. A “no-show” student upsets this order by leaving a gap in the work sequence, and thereby creating serious problems for the rest of the team.

Future iterations of the video project will attempt to resolve the “free rider” and “no-show” issues. The distinction between individual and team effort will be more clearly delineated in future projects, for example by having each group member pre- pare a preliminary and independent “digital story.”15 These digital stories would be graded individually, so that each student could be clearly held responsible for their part of the project.16 It would be obvious which students were free riders or no-shows. The remaining team members would be able to adjust their efforts to fill in the gaps of their project, and avoid depending on the work-product of the missing student.17

CONCLUSION

Our experiences with group projects in the two biology courses suggest that such work enhances student learning and general education competencies, and therefore we plan to continue using these projects in our classrooms. However, these observational conclusions need to be supplemented by more rigorous analysis, and our future efforts in this area will include developing assessment instruments to evaluate the effectiveness of group project work.18 Additionally, because adverse intra-group dynamics can negate much of the pedagogical advantage of group work, we will also explore techniques to monitor student work and facilitate cooperation among team members.

Zvi Ostrin
Natural Sciences

Flor Henderson
Natural Sciences

ENDNOTES

1. Gross, Barbara (1993). Tools for Teaching. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid.

4. This typology modifies Gross’ (1993) categories.

5. Centre for Teaching Excellence (2009). Group work in the classroom: types of small groups. University of Waterloo, Canada. www.cte.uwaterloo.ca/teaching_re- sources/teaching_tips/tips_activities/gw_types_of_small_groups.pdf (accessed January 30, 2009).

6. Keiler, Leslie S. (2008). General Education Biology Students’ Perception of Active Learning through Collaboration in an Urban State College. DisCover, vol.1.1.
   http://york.cuny.edu/centers-institutes/cetl/programs/discover/discover-volume1.1.pdf%20/view (accessed January 30, 2009).

7. Professor Henderson teaches, and is course manager of, Biology I (BIO 210), a course that is designed for biology majors. Professor Ostrin teaches, and is course manager of, Anatomy & Physiology I (BIO 230), a course generally taken by students who wish to enter the health science professions, such as nursing or radiology technician.

8. A COBI award aided in the development of this video project.

9. Nearly every topic from the Anatomy & Physiology I syllabus was included: atomic theory, chemical bonds, carbohydrates and proteins, lipids and nucleic acids (in general), DNA and RNA (more specifically), cell structure, cell transport, tis- sues, integument (skin), skeleton anatomy, skeleton physiology, muscle anatomy, and muscle fine structure. Topics from the end of the semester—blood and cardiovascular system—were not assigned because the students would not have covered these topics by the time the projects were due, and it was thought that they would have too much difficulty assimilating the unfamiliar material.

10. For maximum ease in uploading and access, the videos were posted on Youtube and the students were told how to find the videos. YouTube, for better or for worse, is now an integral part of our common digital culture, and it is more user-friendly and accessible than Blackboard.

11. It was originally thought that the primary effort of each student could be independently identified, and that grades could be assigned coherently, with seventy percent of the grade based on each individual’s job(s), and thirty percent on the overall quality of the final project (i.e., the ‘team effort’). Ultimately, this thinking was unduly optimistic: it was not easy to isolate the individual student’s contribution from the collective effort that resulted in the final submitted video.

12. The tension endemic to group work is reminiscent of the two men described in Robert Frost’s poem, “Mending Wall.”

13. Perhaps ten percent of the students fit into the free-rider category, but of course it is impossible to know this with certainty. Ironically, the only significant com- plaints came from groups whose team members were working hard, but could not come to agreement on the methods or the schedule for doing the work.

14. Approximately ten percent of the students fit into the “no show” category. Together, the no-shows and the free-riders account for approximately fifteen percent of the class (adjusted for those who belong to both categories). It is obvious that group work, like civilization, has its “discontents.”

15. Digital stories can be created using the same Windows Movie Maker software that is used to make videos. Both types of presentations can combine images, audio, titles, and even music to yield the final product. The difference lies in that the digital story is essentially a narrated slide show, similar to PowerPoint, where the image and the sound are created separately before being linked, whereas in a video the moving image and audio track are usually created simultaneously. In practice, however, a digital story can have video elements, and a video can have digital story elements—i.e., still images or titles—within the same creative product, ultimately blurring the distinction between the two formats.

16. During the Spring 2009 semester, groups in an Anatomy and Physiology II class (BIO 240) were asked to create digital stories rather than videos. In every group, each team member was explicitly responsible for one minute of the digital story. It is hoped that this modification will adequately resolve the free rider problem.

17. Another partial solution would be to incorporate research logs and peer evaluations into the Anatomy and Physiology video project, as was done in the Biology I project, to better monitor the students’ activities.

18. As Bonwell and Eison point out, “most published articles on active learning have been descriptive accounts rather than empirical investigations, . . . and a large number of important conceptual issues have never been explored. Therefore, it is imperative that any group work effort would be implemented with qualitative and quantitative evaluative strategies.” Bonwell, Charles C., James A. Eison (1991). Active Learning: Creating Excitement in the Classroom. ED340272 Sep 91 ERIC Digest.