Grading Group Assignments

Group assignments can be both helpful and challenging in our quest to create more equitable learning experiences for students. Grading brings a number of the challenges into focus as we try to navigate participation, responsibility, and content mastery, and as we struggle to determine who is responsible for what parts of the work and whether the experience of  working together was positive for all group members. This conversation has been percolating around campus, especially in the context of the Grading for Equity book group last spring.

Resources:

• Feldman, Grading for Equity, chapter 8, especially pp. 102-106.  An interview with Feldman gives a quick look at his argument. A piece by Feldman on equity in grading (and another). A chatty blog post from Whitman College about implementing these ideas in a CS courses.
• Marty Baylor, Debrief on Group Work Issues
• A table summarizing possible approaches to assessing group work from Carnegie Mellon Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence 
• Brame, C.J. & Biel, R. (2015). “Setting up and facilitating group work: Using cooperative learning groups effectively.” Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching.  Uses student reflection and checklists for assessment.  See also Brame’s “Team-based learning”
• Christine Harrington, “Grading Group Work” in The Scholarly Teacher (2015) feedback, not necessarily grading.
• Cornell Center for Teaching Innovation, How to Evaluate Group Work
• Edutopia “Group Work That Works”  K12 but useful and sensible on roles, tracking participation without necessarily grading
• Krysten Anderson, “Five Tips for Structuring and Grading Group Projects” (2018)
• Li-Shih Huang, “Students Riding on Coattails During Group Work?” (2018) nice chart for laying out project stages
• Forsell, Johan, Karin Forslund Frykedal, and Eva Hammar Chiriac. “Group work assessment: assessing social skills at group level.” Small Group Research 51, no. 1 (2020): 87-124.