8.3 Maximal allocation

In group projects it is necessary to divide a cohort of students into groups. Students and staff would like each group to be equally able to complete the group task. It is important to maximise each group's chances of doing well.

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This bundle helps to identify individual characteristics that might be combined to make successful teams.

The way it works is that students complete a questionnaire ? due to Belbin (Belbin, 1981)? that will form a profile of their potential contribution to the team across eight broad areas: implementer (makes decisions or plans happen in a sensible and practical way), coordinator (makes sure everyone is clear about what is to be done), shaper (driven by urge to get things done), plant (source of new and unusual ideas, suggestions and plans), resource investigator (makes friends easily and has masses of contacts), monitor-evaluator (steady person who thinks things through), team worker (makes sure everyone works together well) and finisher (meets deadlines at all costs).

Use the scores for individual students to allocate students to groups so that each group contains one coordinator, one strong plant or shaper, one finisher, one team worker and one monitor-evaluator.

It works better if no group contains two strong plants without a very strong coordinator, and also that the groups are roughly comparable in overall technical ability.

It doesn't work unless you read one of the texts that include a copy of the Belbin questionnaire, and an explanation of the scoring system. It also requires a fairly large cohort of students and is more time-consuming to administer than some other allocation mechanisms. It is useful, however, for students to use the questionnaire to reflect on their own traits. Sometimes the distribution of Belbin categories is very uneven.

Variation: Alan Jones from the University of Teesside has used this technique in a Master's level course. He describes it in: Experiences of Profile-Based Group Composition in the journal Computer Science Education 1999, Vol. 9, No. 3, pp. 242-255

References Belbin, R. M. (1981) Management teams: why they succeed or fail, Heinemann.

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So: invest a little time in reading about Belbin's questionnaire and use it to build good teams.