Students taking BIOL 1510 - Biological Principles this semester are giving group presentations about recent research articles that relate to the material in the course. One of the logistical challenges to implementing group projects is forming the groups themselves. Drs. Jung Choi and Chrissy Spencer are using CATME.org, a free tool developed at Purdue University, to help form groups in their class. I've asked a Dr. Choi a few questions about why they decided to use CATME.
1) What is special about CATME and how does it help you form groups in your class?
CATME surveys the students in the class about their weekly schedules, their major, their writing and software skills, whether they commute or work off campus jobs, their activities like sports, whether they belong to fraternities or sororities, and their preferred teamwork and leadership styles. It crunches all this information and generates groups that have compatible schedules and teamwork styles. The instructor can also choose whether the groups should be diverse in terms of major and skill sets. CATME is flexible and easy to use. We allowed students who want to be in groups with other members, or who want to form their own teams, to do so. I just tell CATME to form these particular teams, or make sure that these two or three students end up on the same team, and CATME works within those constraints. Overall, forming groups in a large class with CATME was a much easier experience than previous years.
2) How did you form groups before and why do you think CATME will work better?
In previous years, we either allowed students to form their own groups, or assigned them by hand using only criteria that are readily available from the class roster, such as their major, gender, and year. One of the most frequent complaints was that groups often had difficulty scheduling times to meet and work together. With CATME, students can see with one click what time slots are available for group meetings. I've talked to faculty at other universities who tested CATME. For one class they formed groups randomly, and for another they formed groups using CATME. Students did not know how their groups were formed. The instructors reported that the class with CATME groups worked much better overall, with fewer problems and much higher student satisfaction.
3) It seems like there is always one group that doesn't work well together in a class. How will CATME help with that?
Another cool feature of CATME is that it's used not just for group formation, but also for follow-up assessment. Students will complete surveys after their group projects are done, to assess their own and their group members’ contributions. CATME can then inform a student whether his or her self-assessment agrees with the views of their team members. I think that feedback will help students' awareness of how they work in teams.
4) Any thing else you'd like to share about CATME or your projects?
The group projects are one aspect of the active learning in our intro biology class. A large lecture class runs the risk that the student experience would be no better than being in one of these MOOCs (massive open on-line courses), if all that happens in a 50-minute class period is that students sit and listen to someone running a slideshow. We want to take full advantage of a real classroom by having students talking and working together in real-time, to see how the concepts and facts they read about in the textbook, or heard about in a video lecture snippet, applies to real world problems.