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Homework Teams Mathematics 105, 115, and 116 assigns team homework as well as individual homework. Homework teams are created on the second day of class. Each week the teams are required to work together to analyze and solve the team homework problems and write up the solutions. Students are encouraged to meet twice a week: once to discuss the problems and find solutions and once to go over the final write-up. A preliminary reporter's page is due after their first meeting and the second is due with the final product. Each team turns in a single set of solutions. The instructor grades the homework and hands it back at the earliest possible date. (Feedback is more useful to students if they receive it soon after they have done the work.) Everyone on a particular team gets the same grade. It is the instructor's responsibility to assign teams. Instructors in previous years have found that teams of four worked best. Groups consisting of only two students working together failed to generate enough ideas, and teams larger than four often have trouble functioning. With four on a team, an occasional student's absence won't matter. A reasonable strategy for assigning the first teams when you know little about the students, is to group students who live near each other—preferably in the same dorm. (A list of dorms follows.) This minimizes logistic problems concerning where the group will meet. Until you know students better (and know when someone can hold their own), do not put one woman with three men. Some women put in this situation tend to participate less and often feel their contributions are not valued. We suggest that you change the makeup of homework teams two times during the semester (after each uniform exam.) This allows each student to get used to working with a range of other students. Mixing groups helps in dealing with problem students or with groups where one or two students tend to dominate. When you change the makeup of the teams, you may want to use a mixture of criteria for groups. There is evidence that having a mixture of levels in a group helps it function better. In this case, if everyone is working, both strong students and weak students grow stronger. It is also useful to have a mix of gender and race. When students have a good experience working together it leads them to respect the opinions of others. Objectives for using cooperative homework teams:
Advantages of homework teams:
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