Sarah Slade

Group assessment

I hadn’t even thought of how you could assess group work before this course. The task for today was to read a paper giving guidelines on assessing group work in a university setting and then recommend an assessment approach for a university level group task where 300 psychology students were divided into groups of six to carry out an experiment. The task was to test their knowledge of the subject, the scientific method and their ability to work as a group. The students hadn’t always managed to organise synchronous meetings and they hadn’t met face to face.

I puzzled over this a good while, went off, hemmed a couple of pairs of trousers, came back and decided to do an old-fashioned card sort.

Here’s stage 1: discarding the options that only worked in classroom settings and/or put too heavy a workload on the tutor/assessor:

a set of post-it notes showing two piles of marking options for a group test
This shows the possible options on the left, and the discarded options on the right – with my notes in red

Once I had discarded nearly all of the options except for four or five, I moved to stage 2, which was a deeper analysis of the five remaining options

5 post-it notes representing different marking options, sorted into two piles
Oh, it was five options. Again, my notes are in red. The green outline indicates my final choice

This stage meant comparing the options against my criteria. In the end I plumped for one of the ‘other options’ as the most feasible and fairest assessment option for a largely online group.

Students would get two marks: the lecturer/tutor would mark a final group presentation. The second mark would come from the students marking each other on their contribution to the task.