Thursday 15 January 2009

Primary education

I had an interesting conversation with a colleague about the optimum group size for seminars and tutorials yesterday. My colleague is a long standing and very experienced tutor, and he has often talked to me about his theories about the perfect number of students in a group, based on his observations of past successful and unsuccessful learning situations. His magic number is 7, and the absolute no-no is 8. So close, but in his view, so very different.

An article in last week's New Scientist magazine about the ideal size for a committee caught my eye, as it reported that computer simulations had identified committees with 8 members as the absolutely, definitely worse group size ever. I pointed my colleague to this article, and we started speculating about why this might apply to tutorial groups. One of the characteristics of 8 is that it can be divided up in many ways. If you are a member of a group of 8, we mused, then you may subconsciously think of yourself as in either in one group, in one half of two sub-groups, as one partner in one of 4 pairs, or as an individual. In a group of 7, you are either a member of one group, or an individual. The more times you can evenly divide a group up, we decided, the more difficult it is for the members to cope with the mental multiple membership issue. So, the ultimate group size should always be a prime number. I suggested that we should test this theory out, but my colleague said that we would need to set up deliberately bad group sizes in order to know for sure, and that would be unethical. "Fortunately, we're artists and not scientists, so we can just do what we feel is right." I half-joked.

2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, 31

3 comments:

Steven Warburton said...

Great post, and now I have a chance to test the theory of the dreaded 'eight' in a course I am teaching on. I will have to report back. And as an aside - for anyone teaching really big groups then this might be handy:
http://primes.utm.edu/largest.html

Steve Jones said...

As one of the "dreaded" eight (please don't be too hostile!), will my knowledge of this potential factor influence the outcome??!

I'm not sure that the operation of the 8-effect will be so obvious in the virtual space we're currently inhabiting...

Bettina Tizzy said...

Ah, fascinating. However, for all the reasons that 8 people might not a good committee make, that same crowd makes for a great dinner party. Preferably at a round table.