The teacher gives feedback to the groups about their work and is responsible for dissolving and forming new groups when certain groups do not seem to be functioning well. The students are responsible for forming groups which function well both academically and socially. Mathematics is well-suited to group learning, but this form of learning is also suited to topics in statistics, economics and social science. In applied subjects, like statistics and economics, the solution to a problem may be less interesting than the model underlying the solution. Groups are ideally suited to discuss such models.
Students can learn more in groups than by themselves because of student-student interactions.
Students can then test their understanding by explaining the process they used to the rest of the group. We think groups should be fixed for a semester because students need some time to get used to each other. We have groups that do not function well and need to be reorganised. The difficulty is that it takes time to recognise this, and by then the damage has already been done. It should be possible to reorganise new groups from the students belonging to a number of unsuccessful groups, but this is not an easy task, and we do not have a good solution for this.