Introduction to Assigning Groups

Learning to work with others and share ideas is a valuable workplace skill.  To practice this, engineering classes frequently assign group projects and sometimes group homework. Groups are either self-selected or assigned by the instructor.  For self-selection, students with friends and peer connections in the class self-select into groups, leaving students with fewer connections struggling to find a group.  Randomly assigned groups solves this problem and mixes students across the class but may still be unfair, or without the right skill mix.   Deliberately assigning groups based on a set of rules can balance skills, lead students to explain their ideas more thoroughly, and explore a broader set of approaches.

The instructor can better balance groups’ strengths by spreading out students with specific skill sets, majors, prior courses, or project team experience.  Rules can be used to group students by project choice, section, or course level.  Deliberately formed groups can help keep the class more cohesive and reduce groups lagging behind, skipping ahead, or chasing an  unproductive approach.  However, forming these groups manually takes considerable time and effort.

GroupEng is a tool that quickly assigns groups based on faculty requirements.  Access it at https://GroupEng.net

Instructions for Using GroupEng

1.  Download an Excel file of your class roster from canvas or faculty center and merge in (add) any additional columns that you want to use for grouping (such as survey data). VLOOKUP in Excel can be useful for this merging. While GroupEng does not store data on the server, you can use a number code instead of identifying information for extra security. 

 

2.  Specify group size and whether a few groups should be larger or smaller if the class doesn’t divide evenly by group size.

3.  Next specify a set of rules for grouping students.  There are four types of rules you can use:

• Aggregate – put students who share an attribute together in groups (section, project choice, ugrad vs grad, etc)
• Balance – creates groups with a similar average score based on a numeric column of data (homework score, test score, GPA, attendance, etc)
• Cluster – avoid isolating students with a certain attribute by including two or more in a group (ex. First gen students, specific interest, major, year, student request to be in group together, etc)
• Distribute – spread out students with a specific attribute across groups (ex. Pre-requisite skill, major, prior group, project team participation, desired group role, students that need to be separated, etc)

Each rule needs to be assigned to a column in your spreadsheet that it will act on.  Then select which attribute(s) or value(s) for the rule to act on.  Each rule can be weighted so that the most important rules are prioritized by GroupEng.  High priority rules should be given a weight at least a factor of 10 more than lower priority rules.  A factor of 2 or 3 difference can be used to provide priority ordering to rules without making one much more important than another.  Small differences in weighting will lead to nearly equal weighting in forming groups.

4.  Once your rules are set, select “create groups”.  GroupEng will then create a set of groups and give you summary information about the groups and how each rule was met.  You can expand under each rule to see the actual groups and attributes.

5.  Finally, download the file for posting that has the student identifier and group number.  A detail file can be downloaded that consists of your original file with the group number added for each student.  The detail file lets you look at each group and see how the group looks across all the rules.  Save the detail file if you will later want to assign new groups that don’t have students with prior group members (distribute on Group1).

If you don’t like some aspect of the set of groups, you can adjust the rules and weightings and rerun.

Additional Information on GroupEng

GroupEng is currently in beta testing.  Faculty are welcome to use it.  We would appreciate any feedback on the tool (klc78@cornell.edu).

GroupEng currently does not have the ability to assign only within sections.  You can come close by assigning a high aggregate weighting.  A sectioning feature is in development.

GroupEng does not store data on the server.  Data is transmitted back and forth to the server.   GroupEng does not need student names to function.  It will work just as well with some code or id for students and return groups with the same codes for students, thus assuring student data is secure.