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.

Beyond The Classroom [Module 2]

One of the 2nd modules assignments was to make up at least one idea for content, which could be created with students and would have a wider purpose or meaning. Immediately some questions pop up into my mind: Purpose for what and for whom? What kind of meaning? Should this content have wider purpose in students’ lives or wider meaning in society perhaps?

I got few suggestions here. One is idea which we could implement on my entrepreneurship course. Previously on this course we have planned and produced some marketing events with local enterprises. We could do this kind of project and create a blog or social media site - for instance in Facebook - on which we could advertise this event. This site or blog could be shared through social media and this would serve learning goals and have a wider purpose as well. This site should include pictures, videos, stories and links to sites of the interest groups involved.

Another idea was writing and creating a critique of a museum exhibition. Sometimes we visit museums on my optional history courses and students could write about exhibition as part of course performance. And again the critique could include photos and videos along with text and it should be implemented in the way that it can be read in the Internet.

Content Created with iPad: Morfo & Puppet Pals [module 2]

The first video is an instruction video to my students and I have described there, how to use Morfo application. The second one is a student work about Cuban Crisis made with Puppet Pals app. It includes interviews of Fidel Castro, JFK and First Secretary Khrushchev. Both videos are in Finnish, unfortunately.

Content Created with Tablet: Google Sheet & Timeline JS [module 2]

Timeline JS is very handy tool for creating timelines. I teach history and for my purposes making a timeline suits very well. Right below you can see a timeline made by my student. She made it with iPad on a course called World Cultures and it describes the interaction between Europeans and other cultures from Early Modern period forward. The following is a Finnish history timeline, which I made myself for a Finnish history course. Unfortunately both are in Finnish, but I hope you can see the structure of this kind of timeline from these examples.

If you wish to make this kind of timeline, you need to make a spreadsheet with Google Sheets and then publish it with Timeline JS. You can find instructions from Timeline JS webpage.

The Learning Scenarios [Module 2.1]

I understood learning scenario as a certain kind of model, which you can apply on different subjects and age groups. It´s a sort of pedagogical pattern which one can reshape in order to make it fit in one’s own purposes. My own scenarios are not so sophisticated as the model introduced in the video, but those basically include the same phrases

My typical scenario includes some sort of warm up or general discussion about subject (dreaming) and then students have to do some output which they will share to each other (phases explore, map, make and show). For example students will produce a mind map and post it to Moodle forum and then they can comment each other’s works. While students are creating the output - for instance mentioned mind map - I usually observe and conduct the students’ work. So there is a kind of “ask” and “remake” phases included as well.