Having gone through high school and my first year of college, i've realized that group work is an important aspect of learning. We have all experienced that group member who doesn't pull their own weight. It adds stress and frustrates group members who are actually doing work. I always thought this was due to a lack of effort or laziness on their behalf. When reading about the cognitive section, i found that this "laziness" is scientifically supported by psychology research. It's called "Social Loafing". Social Loafing is the phenomenon when people put in less effort to achieve a goal when they work in a group rather than when they work alone. This is seen as one of the main reasons that groups are sometimes less productive than the combined performance of their members working as individuals.
I found a research study conducted on the performance of tug-of-war participants. They found that individual's performance (the force exerted) was higher when compared to the individual's performance when paired up with other team members. This goes to show that we shed responsibility - force in this case - to our other team members thinking that they will pick of the slack. Do you think that this is always the case? or do you think that some group environments encourage participation?
Social Loafing - March 8th
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I'll admit that every so often I am the "social loafer" but when it comes to some things, a little social loafing isn't necessarily all that bad. If the task doesn't take as much effort as another task, then why would you need to put as much effort into completing it? One way of fixing social loafing is to divide up the work before you start doing it. This way you can really see who is doing the work and who is slacking off. Some people however, like to do all of the work, because then they know it is done their way, or the right way. If they care that much, then let them have the social loafers, and give me the hard workers.
In general, I do not like group work for this very reason. I find that it is very common that members of the groups slack and don't do their part because they assume other members will make up for it. I think a big part of this is grading too. Many of my experiences have been when the teacher simply assigns the group one grade for the group and everyone gets the same grade. In this situation I have experienced slacking at its finest, and I usually have to work really hard to make up for others. However, I have experienced teachers, assigning a group grade portion, and a individual grade for each member, depending on what they contributed. Also, I have even had teachers ask each member to evaluate the work of others to make sure that no one is "loafing". I think these are good ways that teachers or professors can get the benefits of group work but without the unfortunate negatives of social loafing.