Group Ability Composition on World Knowledge Problems
Group Ability Composition on World Knowledge Problems
This chapter examines group ability composition and social combination processes on world knowledge tasks. On difficult world knowledge tasks, high-ability persons performed better in cooperative groups with other high-ability members than they did alone, and this difference increased with group size. In contrast, low-ability persons did not perform better in cooperative groups with other low-ability members than they did alone, and there was little improvement as group size increased. Low-ability members contributed very little unique information to one another and virtually none to high-ability members. Medium-ability members displayed an intermediate pattern that was more like low-ability than high-ability members. Consequently, the performance of groups of mixed high-ability, medium-ability, and low-ability members was basically proportional to the number of high-ability members: the greater the proportion of high-ability members, the better the group performance.
Keywords: group ability, group ability composition, social combination processes, world knowledge tasks, high-ability persons, low-ability persons, medium-ability persons, group performance
Princeton Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
