Some Strategies for Reducing Social Loafing in Group Projects

Abstract

The purpose of this paper was to review some of the research on social loafing in general and then to make suggestions about how experimental findings which demonstrate how social loafing can be diminished could be applied to group work assigned in educational settings Several strategies that teachers may use to help reduce social loafing in group projects were discussed in this paper including identifying individuals with a high need for cognition considering the difficulty of tasks using performance measurement emphasizing valuable individual contributions limiting the group size promoting group cohesiveness and using peer evaluations