Influence of group formation choices on academic performance

Abstract

With its multidisciplinary and applied foci, team-working skills are seen as especially critical in business courses in general and in business information systems courses in particular, and are specifically incorporated into desired graduate attributes by many universities. Past research has focused on the benefits of group working but little work has been conducted to examine the relative contribution of group formation choices on academic performance. This paper reports on a study that develops and validates a datacollection instrument and identifies four underlying factors that influence formation of groups: convenience, social cohesion, task management and technical skills/knowledge. The results thus suggest that academic performance is influenced by the skills and knowledge of individual members, potential social cohesion among the group members and the task management ability considered at the group formation stage. The study notes that while how a group is formed influences ultimate academic performance, how the group operates is also an important factor.

Impact of cultural exposure on young Chinese students’ adaptation in a UK business school

“…friends or living close by). The formation influences what the students can gain from teamwork, as well as the team's academic performance, as found by Seethamraju and Borman (2009). Also, the Chinese teams were relatively permanent, with the members progressing within the same class.…”

Social Cues of (Un)Trustworthy Team Members

“…Doing so at least ensures that students will have the opportunity to work with, and learn about, others who are different. This study and others that report criteria used by students to judge classmates and self-select team members (Connerly & Mael, 2001;Neu, 2012;Seethamraju & Borman, 2009) indicate that students do not self-select a diversity of team members to learn about others who are different. Instead, students tend to self-select classmates to achieve intrateam homogeneity on several personal attributes, and to achieve intrateam diversity on the skills, knowledge, and abilities needed to perform well on the assignment.…”

“…Seethamraju and Borman (2009) also found that a team's grade is positively related to the extent to which students make decisions using the criteria. Also, a study by Neu (2012) found that students tend to form a team assignment social network in which network members are tied by beliefs about each other's trustworthiness.…”

A behavioral sequence analyzing framework for grouping students in an e-learning system

“…Grouping techniques have been extensively researched recently. The big significance of grouping in teaching and learning environment is beyond all question in that there are considerable literatures have studied the positive effect of grouping on learning [12] [13]. In traditional classroom, grouping is more based on the teachers' knowledge about students or class performance [14].…”