| Abstract: | Beheshtian-Ardekani and Mahmood [1] recently offered a means of assigning students to groups for class projects to achieve a balanced distribution of student skills within groups. They assumed- but did not show-that the instructor would give weaker students a better chance to learn from stronger group members, that there would be greater synergistic learning effects, and that students would be happier with the project experience. This experiment tests the balanced-group method of assigning students using the people-sequential heuristic by comparing its effectiveness against the results achieved by random assignment to groups. The findings show that balanced groups have a modest advantage over groups formed randomly. Students in balanced groups felt slightly more satisfied with and challenged by the group and shared the work load more evenly. Within randomly assigned groups, student perceptions of the quality of the group-project learning experience were less homogeneous. |
