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Design and manage group assessments

Effective assessment begins with clearly identifying the learning outcomes you intend to evaluate. Once these outcomes are defined, consider whether a group assessment task is a suitable method for collecting the necessary evidence of learning. Once you are sure it is appropriate, then consider how groups will be formed, how student learning and group processes will be supported, and how students will be evaluated.

For group work that contributes to students' grades, it's important to plan each stage of the process carefully. This allows for timely feedback and provides opportunities to monitor group progress, ensuring that students stay on track and receive the support they need throughout the process.

Explain to students the benefits and value of the group assessment task, how it contributes to relevant learning outcomes, and how working in teams mirrors common ways of working within various professional and community settings. Explaining the criteria for assessment, including the group-based and individual criteria, is also important.

Students can be allocated by staff, or through self-selection. Regardless, educators must ensure groups are distributed equally in number, and that they are a manageable size for both you and the students.
It is much easier to manage smaller groups than larger ones, but groups of two or three run the risk of ending up as pairs (or even individuals) if group members drop out or don’t contribute.
Groups can easily be set up using auto-create for random allocation into groups or this can be done manually. All groups should be diverse in character, and contain a mix of students in your class - for example, a mix of genders, cultures, ethnicities, local/international students, disciplines, or year levels.
Management and support is central to the group assessment process. Ensuring your students are well supported can help avoid issues and problems during the semester.
Follow the recommendations below to support your students with group assessment:
- Provide students with useful resources on issues such as teamwork, planning meetings, delegating work, resolving conflict, and group management.
- Create a group assessment folder or section on Moodle so students have them all in one place.
- Encourage groups to establish guidelines about the regularity of meetings to ensure students are accountable for their own progress.
- Set up a way for students to meet with you or others in the team regularly to provide early feedback and to avoid finding out too late that the group isn’t working as planned.
- Keep records of your meetings with group members in case you need them later on.
Even with good planning and design, dysfunctional groups can happen. Having contingency plans in place before you allocate groups can assist. Think through how you will support students to help them resolve conflicts, what you will do to assist if needed, and what options might be available to you should the conflict not be resolved.
When assessing a group task, consideration should be given to whether you are assessing the process of the teamwork and/or the final product, and whether you want to allocate individual marks, group marks, or both. Assessment criteria should be carefully written to ensure that each team member can be properly evaluated on observable criteria
Criteria for process might include things like:
- adoption of group roles and responsibilities
- application of leadership skills
- demonstration of problem solving
- evidence of cooperation and effective communication
- responsiveness to feedback (both educator and peer)
- appropriate organisation and time management
- evidence of equal contributions
The assessment criteria for the final product will depend on the learning outcomes for your unit and the nature of the group task (i.e. the assignment submitted). This means if the process of working is something you will assess, consider if the unit learning outcomes refer to this so that this aspect of the group task is aligned with the unit learning outcomes.
Consider the equity of allocating a group mark for the assessment; a group assessment that results in inequitable contributions from team members means that contributing students may be allocated a lower mark, or non-contributing students may end up with a better mark than they deserve.

Combining group and individual marks

A more equitable method of evaluating group assessment is to use a combination of group and individual marks.

You may want to allocate a percentage of the mark towards an individual mark, meaning students can be allocated appropriate marks based on their contribution, effort, and work. For example, if your group assessment task is worth 40% of the students’ final mark for the unit, you could split this into 30% for the final outcome/product, and 10% as an individual mark.

An educator’s individual marks should only be given for criteria that can be measured and should not be based on your observations of what may (or may not) have occurred in the group. For example, individual marks for effort should be based on direct evidence, not on your perception of (or other students’ comments about) their efforts. For example, if a student approaches you to discuss a conflict with another group member, this should not be used as evidence that the student being complained about is making no effort in the group. As a result, it is not always ideal for educators to be responsible for awarding the entire individual mark as they have not been involved in all of the processes that groups undertake to complete a group assessment.

One way to overcome this is to implement both self- and peer evaluation as an element of the assessment. This can include a mix of team ranking activities, self -evaluation, self-reflection, reflection on group processes, or other valid methods of evaluating individual contributions to group work.

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Learning and Teaching: Teach HQ

Learning and Teaching: Teach HQ

Design and manage group assessments

Combining group and individual marks

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