Assessing Group Work

Assessing group work

Although we often feel frustrated by it, assessment does play a significant role in defining for our students what is important to learn. Obviously where significant time investment is involved, students expect some marks to be associated with that activity.

Underlying all assessment activity must be a clear link back to the original learning objectives for your subject. If you have identified the development of group work skills as an objective for your course, then the absence of assessment targeting these skills devalues the process. Equally, the assessment criteria must be open and available, and both you and your students need to have a clear understanding of how those criteria will be applied.

Assessing group work offers its own set of challenges so, in addition to conforming to these general principles of good assessment practice, there are further guidelines that you should take into account when planning group projects, including the guiding principles and policies for assessing group work outlined by the Academic Board.

There is a practical difficulty when it comes to assessing the contributions of individual students to a group product. One response to this problem is to get students to engage in group activities for their learning value, but to assess each student on individual tasks after the learning has occurred. This preserves the individual character of final grades, but tends to undermine the motivation for group work in the first place.

A second approach is to decide that the benefit of collaborative learning exceeds the risk to the validity of the summative assessments of individual students. Some of the assessed tasks are intended to be completed as a group and all students in the team get credited with the same mark. However, this does not address the common concern of both staff and students that only some of the group members actually do the work that is eventually rewarded, or that capable students would have gained better marks if they had not been handicapped by weaker partners.

A third response is a compromise between these two positions. Students work collaboratively on a task and submit a team product. However, before each team member is awarded a grade the teacher makes further inquiries into the learning and contribution of each team member. The most common method of evaluating the amount and quality of an individual’s contribution to the group is through the use of peer assessment.