Strategically creating maximally heterogeneous lab groups did not improve group performance in an introductory biology lab class

Collaboration is a critical skill for professionals in any field to master, and group work is a prominent component of many lab courses. However, there is conflicting guidance about the best method for forming groups to maximize performance and student experiences. Based on the benefits of cognitive diversity, we hypothesized that creating maximally heterogeneous groups would improve performance on lab activities. We conducted a quasi-experiment in the lab sections of a large-enrollment 2-semester introductory biology for majors course sequence (n = 986). In these large enrollment courses, students simultaneously enroll in smaller-enrollment lab sections. Each semester, we assigned groups randomly in half of the lab sections and in the other half of lab sections we strategically assigned groups to be maximally heterogeneous in terms of race, gender, and prior preparation. We examined the impact of group assignment on students' academic performance (their grade on their collaborative lab report and their overall lab grade), incidence of group conflict, and student attitudes towards group work (i.e., teamwork satisfaction and perceptions of collaborative learning). We found that group formation strategy had no impact on students' grades on either their collaborative lab report or their overall lab grade. Group conflicts were reported so infrequently that we were not able to detect any differences between the two groups. Our measures of groupwork satisfaction and perceptions of collaborative learning failed to demonstrate measurement invariance between the two types of group formation, which prevented us from assessing whether student attitudes differ, but suggest that there is some experiential difference that we were unable to capture.