Assessing Group Work [Module 3]

This module made me think closer about the assessment of group works. I have always found it difficult, but I think I found some ideas from the videos and also got affirmation for my own thoughts. I think that the assessment should both guide learners to wanted direction and at the same time be fair, just and objective. And by just and objective I mean that every learning process should be measured in the same way and with same scale so that the grades can be comparable. It's not easy to combine these two goals ("guiding and grading") to same assessment method.

The assessment should be made clear for the students so that they know how they are expected to work both as individuals and as a group. In collaborative learning teacher have to decide whether he/she is going to assess the process of learning, the collaboration, the outcome or all of these. Is the focus of assessment going to be in increasing of knowledge, in collaboration skills or in development of other kinds of skills? I think that the assessment should be formative and it should focus at least partly on the learning process.

It would be ideal to assess the development of skills, but its so difficult area itself to evaluate, let alone assessing it as part of group work. So it’s probably better to try to improve students’ skills through discussion or other methods instead of assessing those.

Here are some aspects that are useful for a teacher to think about while planning the group work assessment

• How should I assess the learning process and how the outcome?
• How I can assess the development of skills?
• What about increasing knowledge? Should I put weight on this?
• How about the effort of an individual? How can I take it into account?
• How should I evaluate the collaboration of whole group?

Teacher should make decision where is going to be the most weight of the assessment. Teacher should not take only one perspective into account (for instance the outcome), but there should be some sort of understanding on which areas the main focus is. Only this way students may have clear instructions how their work will be assessed and where their main focus should lie.

What it comes to group work usually I have assessed the following 

• individual effort and output
• group output
• the working and learning process
• collaboration

Useful methods of assessment

• assessment criteria set by teacher
• self assessment
• discussions
• peer review 

I have sometimes used a kind of peer review as part of assessing group work. In this model one group will assess the work of another group and this will have impact on the final grade. One can always build a combination of peer review, self assessment and teachers grading. A certain percentage of grade will be formed on the bases of self assessment and peer review and rest of it is up to teacher. For instance Moodle Workshop supports this kind of assessment. (Take a closer look at the Moodle Workshop with this video. Workshop is not originally developed for group work but it can be applied to it.)

Facing the Challenges of Collaborative Work [Module 3]

I find clear instructions and learning goals an important factor in successful group work. The task should also be easily divisible so that every member in the group may have a meaningful job to work with.

When we are working in groups, I try to observe the collaboration of each group and I give support and guidance and try to motivate if necessary. I try to keep each group member on track.

Finally I use assessment in order to keep every student focused in the group work. For example my student work with different kinds of problem-based tasks during the economics course and they write their reports or views or suggestions to a group’s own wiki page in Moodle (learning environment). During the course I guide and observe students’ work and in the end of the course I assess this “wiki work” of each group. This assessment will be part of their course grade. (And if I want, I can check each group members writing activity from Moodles logs.)

But so far on every course there has always been some freeloaders who try to work as little as possible and probably this will be the case in the future as well.

Forming Groups [Module 3]

I work on upper secondary education (same as high school) and we have five periods in a school year and students are studying for six weeks on each course. In my classroom students are sitting in groups (four on each) and I let them pretty much decide with whom they are working with.

Usually I don’t know my students well enough in order to form certain kinds of groups. For instance it would be pretty difficult to take different kinds of learning styles or skills into account. So what comes to forming the groups I let the students decide.