Overcoming Barriers to Heterogeneous-Group Learning in the Political Science Classroom

Despite positive findings, small-group activities continue to lag behind lectures in political science classrooms. This article argues that one barrier to wider adoption of more innovative activities is uncertainty about how to efficiently and fairly create teams that each are heterogeneous and as a set are balanced across relevant characteristics. We first describe recent findings and strategies for creating teams; we then detail our concrete, general approach for incorporating several student characteristics into team creation. We then describe implementations of this approach using freely available software in two undergraduate political science courses-one in American politics and one in political methodology. In these applications and in a variety of simulated data, we demonstrate that teams created using our method are better balanced than those created by randomly allocating students to teams.