New Perspectives in Science Education

Organising students into groups for studying is widespread and being done with an increasing frequency world-wide. However, there is little knowledge available on how to organise and run the student study groups in the most efficient manner. To provide insights and guidelines for the best practices if the study group organisation, the paper describes a case study conducted with 74 Bachelor students at a university in Austria. Various effects of the group splitting by the knowledge level are shown, particularly, the performance successes in the study (the teachers’ perspective), as well as the satisfaction from the study groups, work load assessment, fairness, leadership and other competences gained, study journal usage (the students’ perspective). Overall, the organisation of the study groups with the size of 3 students at homogeneous knowledge levels has been well accepted by the students and led to a higher study performance at all knowledge levels. Combining the approach with further teaching methods and performance evaluation approach emphasising both the group as well as the individual learning gains can bring further improvements.

Keywords: Study groups, study performance, university, bachelor course.

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