The Nominal Group Technique

The nominal group technique is a method of rapidly gaining useful information about some aspect of your teaching in the space of an hour or so. At the end of the session in which the technique is applied you will have completed the process and will have a tangible product which records the outcome.

To keep the explanation concrete we will imagine that the task is to find out what students think are the strengths of your subject and how it might be improved. In order to gain greater frankness from your students you may want to get a colleague to carry out this process for you. Sometimes two colleagues will agree to carry out the process for each other's classes.

The method

• If the class is a very small one (say 12 students or fewer) then you might like to work with the whole class. Otherwise try to arrange for about a dozen students to participate. These students are not really a group in any formal sense (for example, they may have nothing in common other than taking your class), but for the purpose of this exercise they are treated as if they are -- hence the name of the process; the students are only nominally a group;
• One good way to organise a session is to run it at lunch time and provide a simple lunch -- fresh sandwiches and juice, for example -- for the participants;
• You will need some butcher paper, a few pens to write on it and a means of fixing it to a wall. The report will be on the butcher paper at the end of the process;
• Start by asking each student in turn to nominate one strength of your subject. Write each of these on the butcher paper. Once every student has had a turn allow them to have another. Should a student not have any further suggestions then that student drops out of the process for the time being. Keep going round the group for further suggestions until all students have dropped out;
• Now take the suggestions, all of which have been written on the butcher paper, and ask students to vote for each suggestion whether they agree it is a strength of the subject; record the votes beside the suggestions the butcher paper;
• It is possible to stop here and proceed to look for suggested improvements; however we feel that it is useful to look for salient strengths, not just strengths;
• Take the six or seven most popular strengths (it is, of course, up to your judgement how many to take) and ask the students to vote again. However this time they are asked to vote not on whether each is a strength of your subject, but on whether it is an important strength. "Important" here means that removing this feature would have a serious negative effect on the subject;
• At this stage you will have a list of six or seven strengths of your subject, ranked according to their salience;
• Next repeat the process, but with a different question. You now look for aspects of the subject needing improvement, and salience here means that this improvement is important in the sense that it would make a significant difference to the quality of the subject;
• At this stage you will also have a list of six or seven changes ranked by the extent to which making them will improve your subject;
• The process is now complete and, as promised, the "report" is on the butcher paper. You might like to check with the group at this stage that the picture painted is one they wish to convey to the "owner" of the subject.

Variations

Of course the questions may be varied to suit your purposes, but the method is surprisingly widely applicable.

Validity

In our experience it does not seem necessary to spend significant energy trying to get a randomly selected or "representative" group of students. Those students who can make it to lunch seem, when we have undertaken validity studies, to be fairly representative of the views of the class.

Should you wish to get some indication of validity then two processes may be useful. One is simple"triangulation"; that is, repeat the process with another group of students and compare the results. Another, which provides less evidence of validity, but yields other "value added" is to take the results developed with one group and present them to another group for comment ("do you agree with these? are there any others which you, as a group, agree ought to be added?") and for suggestions as to how the various improvements might be carried out.

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