DISCUS-IS Research Blog  ·  Post 1 of 4  ·  Series: What Students Tell Us 

What Makes Groupwork Actually Feel like Groupwork?

On the difference between sitting in groups and learning in them — and why it matters for your statistics classroom

Ask students to describe their introductory statistics class and something interesting happens: many of them lead with groupwork. Not with the content, not with the technology, not with the instructor — with the experience of working alongside other people on something that felt genuinely collaborative. For students in the SBI classrooms we studied, that experience was often novel. And often, it changed something.

The DISCUS-IS project interviewed and held focus groups with 36 students who had taken introductory statistics with one of five instructors identified for their equitable, high-impact practice. Across all of those conversations, UDL consideration §8.3 — fostering collaboration, interdependence, and collective learning — was the second most frequently coded theme. Students weren’t just noticing groupwork. They were thinking carefully about what made it work.

Rearranging the furniture isn’t enough

Avery had taken math classes before where students sat in groups. She knew what that usually meant:

What distinguished the SBI classroom, in Avery’s account and in many others, was that the purpose of working together was legible. The curriculum itself — built around guided discovery activities using authentic data — creates genuine interdependence: students need each other’s thinking to make progress. But students also noted that this only works when instructors make the purpose explicit.

Nathan put it directly: you have to make groupwork feel necessary. “If you can formulate everything in a way where it’s like, “Oh, OK, I understand why I need to be in a group for this” — and you do that enough — I feel like that could really elevate things.” He added that the first few times set the tone: if students understand from the start why the group matters, it changes the dynamic for the whole course.

When it doesn’t work: a candid account

Not every student’s experience of groupwork was positive, and we think it’s important to say so plainly. Dominic described a class where groupwork fell apart: “I feel like the group work definitely didn’t work out well. I feel like we just went off topic so many times. It’d just be a disaster because we had no clue what we were doing… I’d get really confused and that would make me not want to do the work.”

Dominic’s account is a useful reminder that unproductive groupwork isn’t a student problem — it’s an instructional design problem. When the purpose is unclear, when the task doesn’t require collaboration, or when students don’t have enough support to share ideas productively, groupwork can generate confusion and disengagement rather than collective understanding. Instructors who notice off-task behavior might ask first whether the conditions for productive interdependence are actually in place.

Conditions that make it work

Across students’ accounts, a few conditions emerged consistently. Groups worked best when the task genuinely required multiple perspectives — when one person’s graph from the applet plus another’s reasoning about it produced something neither could reach alone. Groups also worked better when instructors circulated, checking in and holding students accountable to each other. Caleb noted that buy-in matters too: “As long as the group is productive and students engage and focus; as long as that is happening, group work is great.”

And students noticed when their instructors built on what emerged in small groups during whole-class discussion — when group thinking became the material of collective sense-making, rather than a warm-up discarded once the ‘real’ instruction started.

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Part of the “What Students Tell Us” series · DISCUS-IS Project · NSF IUSE #2314358