We all appreciate the value of group assignments.
It is on our University's prominent graduate attributes, "Working Together". Group assignments are an invaluable tool for allowing students to cultivate
numerous skills, such as communication, collaboration, teamwork and
time management, as well as preparing them for the reality of the
fact that in their professional lives they will have to work with
other people of different dispositions, attitudes, cultures and backgrounds.
From the lecturers' perspective, however, group assignments always pose an interesting challenge: how do we individually assess the efforts of each group member so as to ensure fairness in marking?
A common practice that we had been following for a number of years required that students were asked to submit a "group statement" (signed by all members) in which they had to describe their individual contribution and any problems that they had faced in collaborating with each other. The idea is that the instructor, after assessing the quality of the entire work, uses this information to weigh the contribution of each member, which, however, is more difficult than it sounds. Even in the best case scenarios, when students submit a well written, very descriptive group statement, assessing the individual contributions is problematic on two levels: (a) it requires a substantial amount of time to identify and assess separately the parts of the work that were produced by individual members, and (b) there is a high level of objectivity involved: how can we weigh this contribution based on a textual description? The problem only gets worse in cases when the submitted group statement is not descriptive enough.
The truth of the matter is that only the members of a group know and can evaluate each others' contribution, so the trick is making students part of this evaluation process. To this end, during the past couple of years we started using the Web Peer Assessment tool (WebPA) (http://webpa.city.academic.gr).
WebPA is an online tool that allows an instructor to:
After students have completed the assessment, the tool automatically generates several informative reports suggesting individual marks (Fig. 2). This is done by allowing the instructor to set up the group mark, decide on the weight of the group mark, and, possibly, a penalty for not completing the peer assessment form.
Having used this practice about eight times between us, and by some trial-and-error experimental attempts, we can indicatively suggest a 75% weight for the group mark, leaving 25% of the individual mark to be generated based on the peer assessment score, with a 10% mark reduction for non-completion.
We are overall very satisfied with the results of this practice. The peer assessment process does not only effectively support the instructor, but also contributes to the learning experience of the students since it allows them to reflect on their own contribution within a team.
If you interested in using WebPA, please contact Dimitris (dranidis@city.academic.gr), the tool administrator, so that he can set you up!
Ioanna Stamatopoulou & Dimitris Dranidis
Computer Science Department
From the lecturers' perspective, however, group assignments always pose an interesting challenge: how do we individually assess the efforts of each group member so as to ensure fairness in marking?
A common practice that we had been following for a number of years required that students were asked to submit a "group statement" (signed by all members) in which they had to describe their individual contribution and any problems that they had faced in collaborating with each other. The idea is that the instructor, after assessing the quality of the entire work, uses this information to weigh the contribution of each member, which, however, is more difficult than it sounds. Even in the best case scenarios, when students submit a well written, very descriptive group statement, assessing the individual contributions is problematic on two levels: (a) it requires a substantial amount of time to identify and assess separately the parts of the work that were produced by individual members, and (b) there is a high level of objectivity involved: how can we weigh this contribution based on a textual description? The problem only gets worse in cases when the submitted group statement is not descriptive enough.
The truth of the matter is that only the members of a group know and can evaluate each others' contribution, so the trick is making students part of this evaluation process. To this end, during the past couple of years we started using the Web Peer Assessment tool (WebPA) (http://webpa.city.academic.gr).
WebPA is an online tool that allows an instructor to:
- set up peer evaluation forms by specifying particular criteria,define the student groups that a coursework has been assigned to, and finally
- set up an assessment by specifying the form to be completed and the groups of students that are to complete it.
After students have completed the assessment, the tool automatically generates several informative reports suggesting individual marks (Fig. 2). This is done by allowing the instructor to set up the group mark, decide on the weight of the group mark, and, possibly, a penalty for not completing the peer assessment form.
Having used this practice about eight times between us, and by some trial-and-error experimental attempts, we can indicatively suggest a 75% weight for the group mark, leaving 25% of the individual mark to be generated based on the peer assessment score, with a 10% mark reduction for non-completion.
We are overall very satisfied with the results of this practice. The peer assessment process does not only effectively support the instructor, but also contributes to the learning experience of the students since it allows them to reflect on their own contribution within a team.
If you interested in using WebPA, please contact Dimitris (dranidis@city.academic.gr), the tool administrator, so that he can set you up!
Ioanna Stamatopoulou & Dimitris Dranidis
Computer Science Department
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