Group assessment can take many forms – group posters, presentations, podcasts and collaboratively written reports to name a few. The main benefit of this type of assessment is clear: by working in diverse groups students can develop key employability skills, such as leadership, negotiation and intercultural competence. In terms of personal growth, students say it helps them develop new friendships and feel more connected to the university community.
There are many examples of effective group assessment at Bristol, from the team assessmentin the integrated master’s in Innovation to the authentic group design project in the final year of Civil Engineering. Despite reading about these successful group assessments and hearing about them at events such as the BILT Show Tell and Talk last May, I still have a few nagging questions about the value and fairness of assessing group work summatively rather than formatively. Why does group work have to be graded? Wouldn’t it be fairer for students to work in groups for formative tasks which could then feed into individual summative assessments? How can group assessment be scaffolded to minimise conflict between students and promote healthy collaboration? This post aims to explore some of these questions and suggest practical ways to mitigate the challenges of group assessment.
Frictions and fairness
My concerns about fairness and conflict were also considered the top two challenges at the Show Tell and Talk event. These issues are often attributed to the lack of experience students have with working collaboratively, as well as a lack of understanding about the marking process for this type of assessment. As a result, there can be communication breakdowns, non-participation and tension between group members. Dealing with these conflicts is stressful and time-consuming for staff, adding to their workload throughout the whole teaching block. However, it became clear during discussions at the Show Tell and Talk that both a transparent group allocation process and marking procedure can increase student engagement in group assessments and therefore ease some of this tension.
Group allocation
Although some departments advocate self-selection while others assign students to groups, a clearly communicated process seems to be key. For example, some academics feel that students should work with people they know for the initial formative tasks when they are first practising teamwork skills before being assigned a random group for the final summative. However, there is also a clear argument for allowing students to work with their friends when the stakes are higher. Perhaps, as suggested by some students from Mechanical Engineering, a combination of random and selective allocation is the fairest approach where students can choose a partner before being allocated another random pair to work with. The matching of these pairs could also take into consideration international students and those with Study Support Plans to check there is the right level of support for everyone in the group.
To overcome the conflict caused by non-participators or ‘free riders’ in the group, some departments have created a best practice guide for students to follow. This may include useful frameworks, such as Belbin’s nine roles for successful teamwork or a group contractthat students have to sign at the start of the project. A clear conflict resolution process is also recommended so students can report personal clashes or communication breakdowns as soon as they occur. In Engineering, students can submit an anonymous team contribution form if a member violates the expectations set out in the team contract.
It was also suggested by the School of Biological Sciences that conflict can be avoided if students are allocated timetabled sessions to work on their group assessments. These fixed slots would remove the stress involved in trying to find a convenient time for everybody to meet. Another option is that students schedule their own meeting dates for the whole term as soon as the assessment is introduced.
Marking procedures
Providing a clear rationale for how group assessments are graded can also increase student agency, for example, explaining why everyone receives the same mark for the final group product or why students will be assessed individually on the process of working as a team. This can be linked to how authentic the task is, for example, how it assesses core competences necessary for their discipline, such as problem-solving through case-based learning in Veterinary Science, or how it reflects what students will need to demonstrate in the workplace.
To shift the focus of the assessment from the final product to the process, some departments ask students to peer assess each other’s contributions. However, it may be harder to explain the rationale behind this approach as how often will students need to grade their peers after university? Although professionals in the workplace are jointly accountable for their team’s output, they rarely have to score colleagues on individual performances.
Peer assessment feels slightly reminiscent of customers rating Uber drivers or Strictly judges holding up their score cards; the main difference being that the customers and judges in these scenarios generally know what a good taxi service or the perfect samba routine looks like, whereas students may not recognise what good teamwork involves. A group member might be working quietly in the background and not receive the credit they deserve or the student who speaks the loudest might get the highest mark.
Some students also admit entering a ‘silent agreement’ with their peers where they give each other the highest mark possible so no one fails the unit or has to retake the year. Therefore, perhaps a more reliable indication of an individual’s contribution is a personal reflection task in which students self-assess their own teamwork skills. Graded self-reflections could be seen as a fairer way to assess the process of groupwork and would also help students to develop the key transferable skill of self-regulation. Therefore, some departments allocate a share of the grade to the final product while the rest is determined by an individual reflection.
Final thoughts
Despite now feeling more convinced about the value of group assessment and how to overcome some of the challenges related to fairness and conflict, a couple of questions still remain:
1. When is the fairest stage of a degree to assess group work? At the beginning of a course, when the stakes are low, or towards the end of a course, when students have had time to develop these skills? Or somewhere in between?
2. How authentic is peer assessment when colleagues rarely have to rate each other in the workplace? Are students cognisant enough of what constitutes good teamwork to grade each other?
3. Should students be given opportunities to co-create the assessment guidance and / or the marking criteria to increase their agency in group assessment?
I’ll continue to ponder these thoughts through discussions with colleagues and by looking at the BILT guide to effective group assessment, but if you have any answers or insights, please do share them below.
