Kinds of Assessment

Assessing Groups and Teams
Self-Assessment

Assessing Groups and Teams

There is a great deal of emphasis in education now on collaborative learning. This push comes partly from the recent research into how students learn that emphasizes the value of collaborative learning (social constructivist theory). It also comes from employers across a broad band of occupations that now require solid team-work skills in their new hires. So, the challenge for the professor becomes how to develop collaborative learning opportunities and how to evaluate student performance in those group activities.

Here are several excellent sites that either deal exclusively with assessing groups and teams, or that contain a section on assessing groups and teams.

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• "Peer Assessment and Peer Evaluation" from the Coalition Foundation, provides many good tips. http://www.foundationcoalition.org/publications/brochures/
  2002peer_assessment.pdf
  
  
• Three quick tips on peer assessment from the Coalition Foundation http://www.foundationcoalition.org/home/keycomponents
  /teams/peer_asses3.html

• "Student Groups: Issues for Teaching and Learning" from the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia. This article provides an interesting online article that includes a good section on assessing group work. The whole article is worth reading for all aspects of designing and implementing group work in your courses. http://www.clt.uts.edu.au/Student.Groupwork.html
  

• "Collaborative Learning: Group Work and Study Teams" From the Faculty Center of the University of Central Florida comes an article on peer assessment. It is worth the read, including the section on group assessment and the component on setting up study teams.
  http://www.fctl.ucf.edu/tresources/content/Collaborative
  LearningGroupWorkStudyTeams.pdf
  
  
• "Assessing Individual Student Performance in Teams" From The Journal of Industrial Technology, Volume 16, No. 3, comes an article worth a look, especially for technical and business faculty. http://www.nait.org/jit/Articles/etta051900.pdf

Using Self-Assessments in Your Assessment Package

Generally, faculty are a bit wary of incorporating student self-assessments in their assessment package. Do students tend to inflate their ratings of their own performance? Can self-assessment help the learner become more reflective practitioners?

This site addresses these questions and provides a sample self-assessment form. http://www.dmu.ac.uk/~jamesa/teaching/assessment_self.htm

"The move to self-assessment: liberation or a new mechanism for oppression?" by David Boud, University of Technology, Sydney, provides a good caution about the use of self-assessment as a means of student evaluation; the chart at the end of the article summarizes both liberating and oppressive aspects of self-assessment. http://www.leeds.ac.uk/educol/documents/00002954.htm

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