Grouping strategies developed in a 9th grade class

Abstract

First, as a language arts undergraduate student taking part of the Residência Pedagógica program, it was asked from me to develop a project to be applied with Brazilian middle school grades. During the development of the project a question arose: How to group the students? Given the circumstances two options were discussed regarding that matter, so, as pre-service teachers, we could either appoint the participants of the groups or let the students decide who they were going to be working with. Thus, this study is looking at two types of grouping strategies: the student-selected and the randomly-assigned. Also, it aims at finding proof to which one may be more effective than the other. Following Chapman‟s (2006) guidelines the questions to be answered are: Does student-selected groups perform activities better? To what extent does one group perform better than the other? As to answer the research questions proposed, there were two groups of students: student-selected group and randomly-assigned group. In the student-selected group, students chose their peer, while in the randomly-assigned group, students were assigned to peers randomly. Then, both groups performed an activity as to test their performance. As a consequence, this study suggests that when using the student-selected grouping strategy students perform better.