H 9.2
Session: H
Parallel Session: 9.2
Research Domain: Reshaping Academic Practice, Work and Cultures
Jan Bamford, David Griffiths, Pam Pickford, Helen Pokorny
London Metropolitan University, London, United Kingdom
Exploring Groupwork: Perspectives from a Staff-based Action Research
Project
As part of an internal learning and teaching development programme, the authors have
convened as a small group of researchers to explore some of the experiences and key
processes which students encounter when they are required to engage in ‘groupwork’
– that is, students working in groups to accomplish some aspect(s) of assessment or
other formal course component. One starting point for the research was the general
view expressed by Livingstone and Lynch (2003) that there is a paucity of research into
the impact of this way of working on students “as assessed through their experience”
(p.326), despite the fact that groupwork has become, in recent years, a ubiquitous facet
of the student learning experience within higher education. The investigation will
therefore seek to extend existing work in this area (e.g. Bourner et al 2007) by
investigating the personal experiences of students which arise from group-based
learning and assessment activities.
As an added dimension to that investigation, aiming to gain a better and more direct
understanding of groupwork issues, the authors are also exploring their own
experiences of working as a group on a formally-evaluated project. Employing a
reflexive, action-research design, the researchers will document, analyse and evaluate
their personal experiences of groupwork. The main data to be presented will consist of
a content analysis of the group members’ web-based personal weblogs (‘blogs’)
mounted by them on a suite of web-based software which is designed to facilitate
virtual group meetings and communications (‘Airset’ - www.airset.com). Personal
reflections contained therein will be informed by the results from personal profiling
instruments – the FIRO-B inventory (Schutz, 1958) and the Belbin Team Role
Inventory (Belbin, 2003) – in the same way that students are sometimes provided with
similar inventories as tools for reflection on groupwork within their courses
While it is anticipated that the subsequent findings of the core investigation of the
students’ experiences will have implications for the way groupwork is utilised for
assessment in universities (another under-researched area), the data to be presented
here will provide an ‘insider’ perspective on the experience of groupwork akin to that to
which students are becoming increasingly subject. In this way the presentation will offer
further perspectives on the impact of the group process itself upon (researchers as)
learners engaged in joint tasks.
Belbin, R.M., (2003) Management Teams – Why They Succeed or Fail (2nd edition),
Butterworth, Heinemann
Bourner, J., Hughes, M. and Bourner, T., (2007) 'First-year Undergraduate
Experiences of Group Project Work', Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education,
26:1, 19 - 39
Livingstone, D. and Lynch, K. (2000), Group Project Work and Student-centred Active
Learning: two different experiences, Studies in Higher Education, 25:3, 325-345
167
Schutz, W. (1958). FIRO: A Three-Dimensional Theory of Interpersonal Behavior, Holt,
Rinehart & Winston, New York.