ABSTRACT
Traditionally, group work has been most common in fieldwork, where there is a task to be performed and it needs more than one person to do it. For example, if you are carrying out a surveying exercise, it’s usually physically impossible to do it on your own. Also, there are issues of safety. It is safer to have groups of students working together in the field than have students out on their own. Even if it’s possible for one person to do the task on their own and there are no safety issues, the limited time available on a field course often means that collecting a reasonable amount of data to address the problem in hand is too big a job for one person. Similarly, it might be useful for you, individually, to learn how to conduct a few questionnaires; but, after you’ve done a couple of dozen, diminishing returns set in. There’s not much to be learnt from questionnaires 50 to 100, although you may need 100 replies to get sufficient data for statistical analysis. So, having five students doing 20 questionnaires each achieves the educational goals, gets the data and doesn’t overload any one student. Group work works!
