Originally posted on October 27, 2018, on LindaSuskie.com
Collaborative learning, better known as group work, is an important way for students to learn. Some students learn better with their peers than by working alone. And employers very much want employees who bring teamwork skills.
But group work, such as a group presentation, is one of the hardest things for faculty to grade fairly. One reason is that many student groups include some slackers and some overactive eager beavers. When viewing the product of a group assignment—say they’ve been asked to work together to create a website—it can be hard to discern the quality of individual students’ achievements fairly.
Another reason is that group work is often more about performances than products—the teamwork skills each student demonstrates. As I note in Chapter 21 of Assessing Student Learning: A Common Sense Guide, performances such as working in a team or delivering a group presentation are harder to assess than products such as a paper.
In their book Collaborative Learning Techniques: A Handbook for College Faculty, Elizabeth Barkley, Claire Major, and K. Patricia Cross acknowledge that grading collaborative learning fairly and validly can be challenging. But it’s not impossible. Here are some suggestions.
Have clear learning goal(s) for the assignment. If your key learning goal is for students to develop teamwork skills, your assessment strategy will be very different than if your learning goal is for them to learn how to create a well-designed website.
Make sure your curriculum includes plenty of opportunities for students to develop and achieve your learning goal. If your key learning goal is for students to develop teamwork skills, for example, you’ll need to provide lessons, classwork, and homework that helps them learn what good and poor teamwork skills are and to practice those skills. Just putting students into a group and letting them fend for themselves won’t cut it—students will just keep using whatever bad teamwork habits they brought with them.
Deal with the slackers--and the overactive eager beavers--proactively. Barkley, Major and Cross suggest several ways to do this. Design a group assignment in which each group member must make a discrete contribution for which they’re held accountable. Make these contributions equitable, so all students must participate evenly. Make clear to students that they’ll be graded for their own contribution as well as for the overall group performance or product. And check in with each group periodically and, if necessary, speak individually with any slackers and also those eager beavers who try to do everything themselves.
Consider observing student groups working together. This isn’t always practical, of course—your presence may stifle the group’s interactions—but it’s one way to assess each student’s teamwork skills. Use a rubric to record what you see. Since you’re observing several students simultaneously, keep the rubric simple enough to be manageable—maybe a rating scale rubric or a structured observation guide, both of which are discussed in the rubrics chapter of Assessing Student Learning.
Consider asking students to rate each other. Exhibit 21.1 in Assessing Student Learning is a rating scale rubric I’ve used for this purpose. I tell students that their groupmates’ ratings of them will be averaged and be 5% of their final grade. I weight peer ratings very low because I don’t want students’ grades to be advantaged or disadvantaged by any biases of their peers.
Give each student two grades: one grade for the group product or performance and one for his or her individual contribution to it. This only works when it’s easy to discern each student’s contribution. You can weight the two grades however you like—perhaps equally, or perhaps weighting the group product or performance more heavily than individual contributions, or vice versa.
Give the group a total number of points, and let them decide how to divide those points among group members. Some faculty have told me they’ve used this approach and it works well.
Barkley, Major and Cross point out that there’s a natural tension between promoting collaborative learning and teamwork and assigning individual grades. Whatever approach you choose, try to minimize this tension as much as you can.