Response to "Student Learning Groups: Homogeneous or Heterogeneous?"

Wow, guilty as charged!  Reading this article by Ben Johnson made me very conscious of the fact that I often group students heterogeneously in an attempt to manage discipline, or in the hope that the brighter students will inspire the struggling students to "try harder."  These assumptions really come into play during our biggest project of the year, our Science Fair project.  I go to great lengths to assure that behavior problems are spread among the different groups, and that lower-achieving students are grouped with the higher achievers.  While this does tend to work okay for the most part, I can always anticipate complaints from some group members who assert, "_______'s not helping!"  And rightly so; often the behavior-problem or low-achieving student is not helping, and is often hindering the group's efforts.  Is this fair to the hard-working students who really want to do a good job, and who would very likely learn a great deal and produce an excellent product if only all the members in the group were working towards a common goal?  No, it's not, but on the other hand, if several behavior problems or low-achieving students were grouped together, those groups would demand a great deal of my time, and I believe that the higher-achieving groups would feel that they were getting cheated out of my attention, and would not be getting all the advice and guidance that they needed.  I'm still not sure of what the right answer is in regard to student groupings on large, long-term projects.


For short-term projects, I do use a variety of grouping methods.  Different methods I have used include:  assigning a partner, allowing students to chose, randomly drawing name cards two at a time, handing out colored cards and directing students to form groups that include one of each color, ...etc.  


Based on this article though, I will reconsider the use of heterogeneous grouping on long-term projects.  Perhaps the best way to really examine this would be to have at least one long-term project with the students grouped heterogeneously and at least one with the students grouped homogeneously. 

The complete article, "Student Learning Groups:  Homogeneous or Heterogeneous?" posted on August 2, 2011 by Ben Johnson can be viewed at:  http://www.edutopia.org/blog/student-grouping-homogeneous-heterogeneous-ben-johnson