The Study Group – Nevada Style

The Study Group – Nevada Style
By Dr. Ken Hunt

The Traditional Learning Model – Revisited

In the traditional Learning Model, the instructor is primarily a dispenser of information to passive student receivers. From the Point-of-View Course Design, the instructor spends much of his time preparing lectures and trying to make presentations more interesting and exciting. Through this process, students become dependent on the instructor.

In the Nevada Study Group Learning Model, courses, and the activities employed in them, must be designed to give students opportunities and incentives to accept responsibility for ensuring that learning occurs. Further, the instructors must focus on creating two very different types of instructional activities. One type must focus on building a sound student understanding of basic concepts. The other type is to design activities that focus on building students’ higher level thinking and problem – solving skills. The two are still linked together; however, the former must effectively diagnose student readiness to participate in the related activities that follow.

Application – Oriented Activities

One of the greatest challenges of using the Nevada Model is designing activities and assignments that are appropriate for developing students’, higher – level, cognitive skills (see Bloom, 1956). In part, this is because most instructors have traditionally focused the majority of their teaching on simply "converting" content. Because of the efficiency of the Nevada Study Group Model, new users of the model face a very different problem. Instead of rushing to make sure everything gets "covered," instructors have a great deal of class time available for helping students learn to use the concepts covered during study group time. Most instructors have had little experience in designing activities that accomplish this.

On the other hand, instead of carrying the entire burden for learning (i.e., the "Atlas complex" – see Finkel & Monk, 1983), instructors who use the Nevada Model to cover course content have two additional assets to work with:

First, students already have a sound understanding of key concepts.
Second, the groups are both cohesive and quite effective at utilizing their members’ intellectual resources (Michaelsen, Watson & Black, 1989).

Thus, with the support of their groups, students can successfully tackle problems that are far too difficulty for even the most talented individuals working alone.

Guidelines for Developing Group Assignments and Activities

A key element in the success or failure of any group – based instructional approach, including the Nevada Model is the nature of the group assignments. To be optimally effective, group assignments, whether graded or not, are designed and managed to simultaneously accomplish four important objectives:

Promoting Learning of essential concepts or skills
Building group cohesiveness
Ensuring individual accountability
Teaching students the positive values of groups

Activities that sacrifice one (or even possibly two) of these objectives can still be used, however. The key is maintaining an overall balance. For example, activities that primarily promote learning are perfectly appropriate if they are interspersed with activities that build group cohesiveness and individual accountability; otherwise, the groups will deteriorate the point of ineffectiveness.

Characteristics of Effectiveness Group Assignments

Not all assignments, however, are equally helpful in building either students’ higher level cognitive skills or their interpersonal and group interaction skills. The nature of the tasks in which groups engage has tremendous effect on the quality of the learning experience they provide. In order to work well, application-oriented group assignments of the Nevada Study Group Model are as

follows:

Must require the groups to produce a tangible output. Otherwise, neither the instructor nor the students will have any idea about whether or not students have developed the ability to use the concepts effectively.

Must be impossible to complete unless students understand course concepts. Otherwise, students are likely to see them as irrelevant "make work" projects and neither the instructor nor the students will have any idea how well the concepts are understood.

Must be difficult enough that very few, if any, of the students can successfully complete the assignment working alone. Otherwise, the majority of the group members will sit back and watch the better students do the work.

Should allow the groups to spend the majority of their time engaged in the kind of activities that groups do well (e.g., identifying problems, formulating strategies, processing information, making decisions) and a minimum of time engaged in activities that individuals could do more effectively working alone (e.g., creating a polished written document). In fact, the greater the length of required written document, the less students are likely to learn from the assignment (i.e., when group is deciding how to carve up the project into manageable pieces – the rest will be individual work).

Should give students the opportunity to practice dealing with the same kind of issues and problem situations they will encounter in later course work or in future jobs. Being able to see how the concepts apply to realistic problems is a tremendous asset to both motivation and learning.

Should be interesting or fun.

REFERENCES

Bloom, B.S. (1956). Taxonomy of educational objectives: The classification of educational goals. New York: David McKay.

Finkel & Monk, (1983). Teachers and learning groups: dissolution of the Atlas complex. In Learning in Groups (pp. 83 – 98). Bouton, C. & Garth; R.Y. (Eds.). San Francisco: Jossey – Bass.

Lewis, C., (1997). Organizational Behavior. Phoenix: Apollo Press.

Michaelsen, L.K., (1992). "Team learning: A comprehensive approach for harnessing the power of small groups in higher education." In To Improve the Academy: Resources for Faculty, Instructional and Development, 1992. Wulff, D.H. & Nyquist, J.D. (Eds.). Stillwater, OK: New Forums Press Co.

Michaelsen, L.K., Watson, W.E. & Black, R.H., (1989). A realistic test of individual versus group consensus decision making. Journal of Applied Psychology, 74(5), 834-839.

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