Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments Overkill with Groupwork

My sons' middle school has become an environment breeding mediocrity at best! Unfortunately, our teachers have bought in to our regional educational cooperative's push for group work everyday in every class. While, I believe group work experiences should be part of any child's educational experience, I'm appalled by its daily misuse in our school. I'm looking for research articles which provide data which support what I'm witnessing in our students--significant decrease in rigor, severe limitations for our gifted, and sickening drops in motivation. PLEASE HELP!

We are seeing it too. We've had multiple group presentations that they work on via google docs. Luckily, DD has been able to pick her group and avoid having slackers on her team. I do see value in DD not always getting everything presented her way and having to compromise with co-workers.

That said, I would feel differently if DD got stuck with a bunch of kids who wouldn't contribute (a constant problem in elementary). In the past, DD would just take over the project so she wouldn't be penalized for being stuck with lazy kids. It infuriated her. DD mentioned another team had a kid who did not participate at all on a certain project because her family took off for a week to Disneyworld. I don't know how the teacher justified treating that kid the same way. Maybe she was supposed to contribute remotely while waiting in line for Space Mountain?!

Well, there's this:


But it's old. More is available, I'm sure. I'd do a search on ERIC for "heterogeneous grouping." Lots of unrelated stuff to wade through, though.