Assessing internal group processes in collaborative assignments

Nelson, Trudi J. (2011). Assessing internal group processes in collaborative assignments. English Journal, 100(6), 41-46.

Nelson provides some innovative, helpful suggestions for assessing collaborative group processes. She is particularly focused on the kind of group assignments where a group of several students produces a single product; in many cases with such assignments, all students in the group receive the same grade. Nelson observed that many of her students had strong feelings, often feelings of frustration, about such assessments. Those feelings often centered on some students’ receiving the same grade as other students but not fully sharing in the work. Nelson built her assessment strategies based upon a survey she gave her students (30 college junior education majors) in an effort to gather data on their feelings about group work. Although Nelson’s work was with college students, I can easily see the feasibility of using both the survey and the assessment strategies she proposes with high school students, and maybe also with middle school students in some cases.

The survey findings are fairly straightforward but not really surprising. We learn that most have believed they had done more than their share on collaborative projects in their experience, while they believed some group members did not do their share. The majority saw the practice of one grade for the whole group as “unfair.” There was nothing unexpected in those findings.

What really was helpful here was the descriptions of three ways to assess group work (pp. 44-45), most involving students in the assessment process, and even possibly involving self-assessment as well. The first option involved assigning a total number of points equal to a prime number (a number that is only divisible by 1 and by itself), and then asking each student to divide the points up among the group members. Prime numbers cannot be divided equally, so the assessor is forced to indicate who contributed most to the project (charts listing prime numbers can be easily found on the Internet). This could be interesting to try, though I wonder if students might be tempted to give themselves the most points most of the time, or perhaps to even actually perceive that they always contributed the most. There could also be some students who would tend to undervalue their contributions, like the example Nelson gives of a student who gave a peer many points for typing up the entire project, whereas he gave himself fewer points because he “only” did the research!

The second option was more qualitative, and also more whimsical! Nelson suggests assigning fiction character roles to group members. For example, the group members might be labeled as Papa Bear (leader), Mama Bear (worker), Baby Bear (loud and distracting but still contributing), or Goldilocks (asking for a piece of the job but not really working collaboratively as part of the group). This project has advantages in its creativity and use of metaphor, and it enables the valuing of diverse group strengths rather than polarizing things as the prime number strategy does, but I worry that the assignment of character traits is somewhat subjective, and also that the whimsy of the strategy might cause students to take the assessment less seriously than they would something more formal. However, that whimsy might also allow students to relax and honestly, constructively assess group processes. This approach would be especially good if the students themselves determined the characters and the traits. That sort of use of metaphor would exercise higher order thinking skills.

The third strategy involved rating fellow group members along four continuua: engagement, leadership, use of time, and support/encouragement of others. This strategy has both quantitative and qualitative elements. Placement along a line implies some sort of continuous numerical value, or perhaps a ranking, but the use of verbal descriptions at various points along the line is qualitative, reminiscent of what good rubrics do as hybrid quantitative/qualitative assessments. As Nelson points out, this kind of assessment is reminiscent of many workplace assessments that employ a Does Not Meet Expectations/Meets Expectations/Exceeds Expectations continuum.

About the only thing I might have asked for in addition to these suggestions is more information about how Nelson suggests actually turning these assessment results into grades. I can certainly see using them for non-graded assessments which enable us to determine how well students work in groups, and how well they assess their own and peers’ work. We still are left with the original dilemma, though, of how you derive grades from all of this. Although I’d prefer a world without grades, and would go teach in that world in a New York minute, I don’t think it exists for most teachers. Still, even though grading is an unfinished issue here, this article provided some new ways to look at assessing group work. It was part of a journal issue on ethical practices, and fits well there, because Nelson showed professional integrity by eliciting and listening to student voices, and sought to devise fair, accurate, student-centered assessments—always a challenge.