How can small group work be assessed?

Who are we assessing?

Group assessment means less marking, and that must be good – and if you can give a group mark, even better! But there is a problem. The notion of a group mark appears to fly in the face of traditional assessment in higher education. Students are assessed as individuals, and their marks form a distribution for purposes of comparison, ie, 1st, 2.1, 2.2, etc. If all group members are assessed on the achievement of the task and all receive the same mark, students and tutors may feel uncomfortable. There’s often resentment amongst students about ‘carrying’ group members who haven’t put in the same amount of effort.

Other concerns commonly raised about group assessment are:

• what if a group member is absent for some of the time?
• what if the student is seriously under-confident, or seems to find it genuinely difficult to contribute anything ‘worthwhile’?
• what should we do about students who have opted out of group work?
• should we be assessing students individually on their ability to work collaboratively?
  So what can we do about all this?

Such questions of fairness and your ability to make valid judgments may deter you from giving a group mark. However, it’s worth noting that there is a basic inconsistency between requiring collaboration on the one hand and assessing purely individual performance on the other.

There are four routes we can take:

1. Give everyone the same mark and be prepared to discuss and argue the consequences.
2. Take a hybrid approach where part of the assessment is for the group activity and another part measures the individual’s contribution. This means that tasks need to be very carefully designed, so that individual contributions are easily identifiable and seen as equal in terms of effort and ability.
3. Design tasks so that there is no overall group mark – the only assessment is the contribution of each individual. You could monitor who does what by asking each group member to complete an activity log – a record of work which has to be agreed and signed by all group members every so often or when the task is finished.
4. Give each group a global mark based on the group’s performance and ask the group to allocate marks to individual members, based on the contribution each has made. The political and interpersonal issues that arise from this do pose particular difficulties and need to be handled very sensitively.

What are we assessing?

Do we want to assess only the group’s performance of tasks? If one of our aims is to develop group working skills then we may want to assess group process, too.

There are a number of ways we can assess how groups have organised their work, how they dealt with any problems they encountered, what they have learned about collaborative work, etc. Methods of assessment include for example:

• group interview with tutor
• group oral presentation
• group report, essay, reflective log or journal

If you want to assess process, I recommend regular process reviews with feedback. Most teachers agree that formative assessment is more valuable for learning than summative assessment. This brings us to…

How will the work be assessed?

Formative assessment

1. Decide who will give feedback. Evidence tells us that students value tutor feedback highly and underestimate the educational benefits of peer and self assessment. Yours may need to be persuaded that their metacognitive abilities will improve through giving and receiving feedback.
2. Make sure everyone observes the rules of feedback. Group work depends crucially on good quality feedback, ie comments that are positive, constructive and specific (see Jaques & Salmon 2007:76/7 for a list of rules).
3. Decide the feedback format. Is written or oral feedback more appropriate, or a mixture of the two?

Summative assessment

What form should the assessment take? There’s plenty of choice. Here’s just some of the options:

• oral presentation
• written report, essay, commentary, case file, project, portfolio
• reflective logs, journals
• a mixture of formats

Much will depend on the degree of complexity of the group work, for example, whether or not you are assessing group process and product, and how long the work takes to complete.

Who will set the assessment criteria? Will you decide these, or agree them with the students? With decisions about imposition versus negotiation, much will depend on the approach you have chosen – the more tutor directed co-operative model, or the collaborative one, which encourages more student autonomy? (see FAQ 1 for more on the two models). The kind of student-staff relationship you want to establish may also influence your decision; what level of egalitarianism are you aiming for?

Persuading students to buy in

Alison Bone (1999: 40) discusses the need to establish a ‘group assessment culture’ to encourage students to buy into group assessment methods and procedures. This is particularly important if students are new to group work. She sets out a list of do’s and don’ts, which I have adapted as follows:

Principles for assessing groups

Do:

• from the beginning make sure students are aware of the assessment schedule
• state the intended learning outcomes
• negotiate the process/weighting/criteria/format
• ensure students accept the above and buy into the outcomes
• be clear about what you’re assessing (process? product?)
• make clear what kinds of communication across groups (if any) is legitimate
• make clear if groups are intended to co-operate with other groups or be in competition with them
• be innovative – develop the pioneer spirit in your students!
• carry out formative assessment and give detailed feedback
• keep in touch with group progress
• encourage students to monitor the group process, for example with a reflective log
• make sure you have a fall-back position (“I reserve the right…”)

Don’t:

• keep group membership the same over a number of assignments
• let students confuse friendship groups with good learning groups
• expect all students to have covered the same content
• over-assess (summatively)
• change rules as you go along without negotiation
• overspecify – give room for creativity and original thought

Other points to consider when planning assessment

Whatever you decide you’re going to do, please bear in mind three things:

1. That assessment can work against learning by an over-emphasis on the ‘right’ answer, method or attitude. We know we learn a great deal when things go wrong, but may be penalised for making mistakes when assessed summatively. If assessment rewards ‘right’ approaches this may discourage the kind of risk taking and experimentation which are at the heart of group learning. If assessment procedures give more credit to risk, reflection and correction, less of it will then be based on product quality with its assumption that this correlates with quality of learning.
2. That a lot of group learning is likely to be experiential – students doing things, reflecting on their performance, generalising from their experience, planning what they might do differently and trying out their plan next time around. Thus there is often a time lag before learning occurs, and this learning may not be captured in assessment.
3. That personal skills can take a long time to develop and are highly contextual. Assessment of group and personal skills often involves assumptions about transferability that have yet to be substantiated.

For further guidance on assessing group work, have a look at Jaques & Salmon (2007). They offer plenty of useful advice, together with templates and checklists.

Last Modified: 4 June 2010