Measuring Healthy Group Dynamics

Credit: iStock.com/Jacob Ammentorp Lund
Credit: iStock.com/Jacob Ammentorp Lund
The importance of small group dynamics is hard to overstate. Group functioning directly influences how well students learn the content, what they learn about working with others, and the attitudes they take with them from the experience. Most groups experience problems; while they usually start small, they’ll likely grow larger if left unaddressed. Being new to collaborative work, students don’t always recognize unhealthy group dynamics or know how to respond to them. Fortunately, researchers (O’Neill et al., 2018) have developed a measure that students can use to assess the health of their team. It “defines effective team health in terms of communication, adaptability, relationships and education,” or CARE (O’Neill et al., 2020, p. 1122). The first iteration of the instrument contained 64 items. The goal of this research was to create a shorter version (dubbed Bare CARE) that still produced stable and robust results.

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One Response

  1. I have students complete peer evaluations in some of my courses and the workload for me to compile all the info is a lot sometimes. Therefore, I was very excited to see the survey on ITPmetrics.com. It looks amazing and very useful for the instructor as well as the student. However, upon signing up to use the site, I read over their privacy information and was surprised how much information they collect when you are using their site. I don’t feel comfortable now having my students use this site. How disappointing :(

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