Just Put My Name On It
One of the hardest things to do in college as an FYC student is to be able to work in groups efficiently. There’s always that one student, or team mate, that relies on the other people to do all the work.We are gonna refer to these people as , “Loafers”, because they just lay around doing nothing helpful and it’s just so frustrating watching them do nothing. You may think this isn’t a real problem, or maybe you just haven’t experienced it yet. But look back to group work that you have done and try and count all of the Loafers that you have worked with. We know that you have dealt with this problem because it is something that we dealt with too, we know what it is like having to check on up on team mates and having to constantly remind them to do some work.The worst part about dealing with Loafers is that teachers expect you to report or rat out any Loafers that may be in the group because your grade depends on it! What if there was a better way of dealing with Loafers other than becoming a snitch? What if there was a way to fix teamwork with FYC students and make them all pull their own weight? When Students work together in groups, Loafers expect to have at least one smart student that is going to do all the work and just hand it over to the rest of the group so that they all can get credit for something that just one or a few hard working students did. During our research we created a method that will anyalate this unfair situation and will make each student involved in group work to pull their own weight while doing a group assignment, and actually allow team members to socialize. So the question we came up with is, how can we change the way that first year college students work as a group and make each team member evenly coperate in a group assignment?
While attending college the last thing that you want to do is to worry about the work that you do with other people. You might think that trying to socialize and work with someone else might be a complete waste of time, and that your grade shouldn’t have to be shared with anyone else. However did you know that most careers offered recommend that you have teamwork skills? Think about it, do you really think that massive corporations are successful just by having people individually work on their own assignments? No they aren’t! They have an unbreakable team that works together to achieve their goals. And what better way is there to perfect your teamwork skills than by practicing it in college as a First Year College Student. If you are still not convinced that having good teamwork skills is look at what our authors had to say about it. According to Timothy H. Reisenwitz and Jacqueline K. Eastman, in their article “Dealing with student group project… “ Teamwork can increase problem-solving ability, raising working efficiency… Moreover, the team operation can faster organize efficiency, such as learning efficiency, innovation capability, working process and quality management”.(01) Do all of these traits capture your attention? If they don’t then you will probably never understand what it is like to have the upper hand of being good at something that will be used in your future; your career! If you are no good at working correctly with others in your job than you are pretty much signing your own death sentence when it comes to liking your job, or even getting promoted to a higher rank due to your skills as an excellent team member! So now do you understand how important this is in your life? Yes? Good! Now continue reading this article to find out just how we are gonna create an efficient way for you to pull your own weight in a group and to master group work while you are in college.
Now to be motivated to do a better job or to actually try when doing a group assignment there is only one thing that can push you more than anything; your grade. In the beginning of the article we mentioned Loafers, these are the students that make you drag them around and do all the work.Well we want to make them disappear, and we don’t mean disappear as in making them excellent students, we mean that we want to turn those Loafers into hard working students by changing the way that teachers grade team work today, we are gonna add some justice to the mix if you catch our drift. So what do we know about how teachers grade students in group work nowadays? We know that the students themselves control who gets the info needed to complete the assignment. We also know that the final draft given by all the team members’ “creativity” is the final grade and that everybody shares a grade. Where is the problem here? That’s right all of it! Most groups don’t have an honorable leader that equally distributes the assignment and has every team member equally contribute to the assignment. And If professors only take the last draft in common when grading than how will they ever know how each one of the team members contributed? They won’t, that’s the bottom line, no one will ever know other than the Loafers and the students dragging their ass around will know that only a few did the work. Such as Lawrence Li mentions in his article, “Some Refinements On Peer Assessment Of Group Projects… “It is necessary to device an assessment method that results in fair grading”. Lawrence’s article only focussed on the engineering and mathematical field but all in all he helped prove our statement and motivated us to make a method that will fix this problem once and for all.and So as we move our subject onto grading let's talk about the people who actually do the grading.
Now when you are trying to fix a problem you have to acknowledge the situation and try to point out every element involved in the problem. In this case professors, teachers, and instructors will be our second part of our research which will help answer our question. Now before you think that teachers have nothing to do with this just think about it for a second, when it all comes down to it and who is the person that hands you your assignment? Who is the person that you hand back the assignment to when you are done with it? Your teacher! On the previous paragraph we explained to you how fixing inefficient grading among group assignment can help get rid of Loafers. If you think about it teachers are the ones that go along with the bad grading policies, some don’t even care to actually look into who is being a Loafer or a hard worker in the group. Trudi J. Nelson clearly states this in her article by saying that, “a teacher can play an explicit role in setting up groups for successful process”. While we are in the subject of teacher we will next show you some methods made by teachers and instructors that were made to help out with group assignments.
Working in group projects is not an easy thing to do. When you see that the work is just too much, you tend to just start slacking off and letting your partner do all the work. Bailey, Voyles, and Durik all talk about this in their article, "Assessing Internal Group Processes In Collaborative Assignments." These authors all talked about how college students begin withdrawing all their efforts due to working together with another person, or other people. They all got other studies to back up what they were saying, but aside from that, they also did a study of their own called “The Jigsaw Method”. This method was a method that was made to get students to divide their work evenly amongst each other. This method they created wasn’t really intended for college students. But it was directed more towards grade school students, that was a downside. Professors and college students still used this method but it wasn’t meant for them.
Students and professors have always tried to find an effective way to work together in groups. Some have accomplished this and others have failed. But Kevin M. Carlsmith and Joel Cooper came up with a method to try and solve this called “The Jigsaw Method”. In their article, “A Persuasive Example of Collaborative Learning”, they talk about how students always push all the work to one of the student. Those students that would get all the work were called “suckers”. Because they would just “suck” the work for themselves because the other students wouldn’t want to help.The jigsaw method was created to try and solve this problem, and it looks like it did. This method was basically made to get students to divide their work so that everybody can pull their own weight.
Before presenting our very own method to you we will be showing an experiment that we did on a group of
students by using the plain old method that we mostly dealt with back in highschool or are dealing with right now which presents the problem that we are trying to solve. This “Cairns Method” involved two FYC college students that were given by us a worksheet that required them to do group assignment just like many teachers assign projects today. As you can see on the pictures below we actually reeled in our very own Loafer! While both of the gentlemen worked on their project the student on the left constantly checked his cellphone while the other one proved to be the most constant when it came to working. Since the project lasted only about thirty minutes imagine what actually happens when loafers have more time for themselves when they are outside of class, they would procrastinate to a dangerous level which could put the whole team in jeopardy!This is a perfect example of what we are trying to solve, this “Cairns” method of ours was meant to be an example of how when students are given a group assignment there is no supervision or consequence for any individual “Loafer” not doing contributing to the team. Because of this problem hard working students are left to deal with these kind of students. There is only one solution for this problem and you need not look any further because it is literally the next paragraph.
The Divide And Conquer Method! Made by yours truly is the method that will finally fix our question, all the suspense and wonder of our research has been leading up to this very moment. We came up with this method by
reminiscing on our own personal experience with teamwork, and thinking of a way that would be fair for all students when it came down to working together. By putting this method to test we discovered that our method does make every team member participate in an assignment which is the primary goal when giving students a team assignment. The “Divide and Conquer” method that we tested on another group of FYC students has two main parts to the work assigned. One part is an individual grade which will be about 60% of the total group project grade, for this individual session the students have to individually gather the data needed to complete the assignment by answering a worksheet that will be provided by the teacher. Once this worksheet is finished then it will be turned in, graded and given back to the student which will use their information to come up with a creative idea to come up with a way to present the information. In our experiment both of our guinea pigs did exactly what we predicted, they took their individual assignment seriously, and then they worked together to make a final draft of their project which ended up being a Venn Diagram showing all their data Now think about this method, how is this method the ultimate solution to our problem. Well for starters in this method every individual student in the group has an individual assignment worth 60% of the total grade in which they need to personally contribute to the team, this right here fixes the Loafer problem. After the individual assignment has been given back the group members now have a chance to collaborate with each other, maybe even socialize and come up with a final project that will use all of their found data.
Group work has never been easy because not everybody thinks the same or plans the same. But that’s why we did this research on how group work functions. We both had past experiences with group work and that’s why we could relate to this. We did our research to take away this problem, not only for us, but for other FYC students. Now we want all of you to try and use this method whenever you get assigned group works. Try talking to your teammate and agree to split the work up evenly. If that doesn’t work then just simply ask for another partner for your group. But at the end of the day we just wanted to inform FYC students that working in a group efficiently is possible.
WORKS CITED
Carlsmith, Kevin M., and Joel Cooper. "A Persuasive Example of Collaborative
Learning." Teaching of Psychology 29.2 (2002): 132-35. Web. Academic Search
Complete. Web. 6 Mar. 2016.
Li, Lawrence K. Y. "Some Refinements On Peer Assessment Of Group
Projects." Assessment & Evaluation In Higher Education 26.1 (2001): 5-18. Academic Search Complete. Web. 1 Mar. 2016
Nelson, Trudi J. "Assessing Internal Group Processes In Collaborative
Assignments." English Journal 100.6 (2011): 41-46. Academic Search Complete. Web. 6 Mar. 2016.
Reisenwitz, Timothy H., and Jacqueline K. Eastman. "Dealing With
Student Group Project Traumas: Teaching Students Recognition, Responsibility, and Resolution of Group Project Problems." Marketing Education Review 16.2 (2006): 9-21. Academic Search Complete. Web. 6 Mar. 2016.
Trudi J. "Assessing Internal Group Processes In Collaborative Assignments." English
Journal 100.6 (2011): 41-46. Academic Search Complete. Web. 6 Mar. 2016.Trudi J. " Assessing Internal Group Processes In Collaborative Assignments." English Journal 100.6 (2011): 41-46. Academic Search Complete. Web. 6 Mar. 2016.
