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By Berry O’Donovan and Laura Morosanu.

This report is not a literature review on assessed group work; whilst it links to, and hopefully highlights, a very useful literature review authored by Professor Graham Gibbs and commissioned by the ASKe CETL, its focus lies one step further on. The purpose of this project was to explore and evaluate the impact on practice of a group work policy based on the Gibbs literature review that was implemented in 2009/2010 in a Business School in a post-92 university. The inter-relationships between research, policy and practice are relatively unexplored in the literature.  Whilst unpicking these inter-relationships lies beyond the scope of this project, the project is situated at their juncture, and perhaps highlights some of the ongoing tensions between professional judgment and evidence-based practice within the context of education.

The focus on assessed group work, and the formulation of a group work policy in particular, was motivated by relatively poor scores on the National Student Satisfaction survey (NSS) question on the fairness of ‘assessment arrangements and marking’.  The NSS along with an internal student survey on assessed group work (both of which included open comments) identified summatively assessed group work (which obscured individual contributions) as a key source of student perceptions of unfairness. This happened despite improved moderation techniques applied in the School, as well as the sustained efforts made by ASKe, focused on enhancing assessment understandings and practice. The worrying results emerging from these surveys thus called for further improvement particularly in the area of assessed group work.

As a first step, a literature review on the assessment of group work was commissioned by ASKe and conducted by Professor Graham Gibbs. The literature review offers a number of evidence-based recommendations on how to improve the summative assessment of group work and perceptions of its fairness. These findings and recommendations stood at the centre of the new group work policy developed and applied in the Business School over the past two years.

The new group work policy encompassed guidelines for group size, group selection and composition (dependent on the duration of the group work), and principles for identifying differential contributions (see Appendix 1). The policy drew a clear distinction between assessing the product of group work (e.g. a report produced by a group of students) versus the collaborative process of group work (e.g. teamwork skills). Since assessing the product of group work raises questions of unequal contributions between the members, a number of recommendations were formulated:

• In UG and PG modules where the product of group work was assessed, the policy required staff to either severely limit the weighting of summative assessed group work (to under 20%) or to identify and evaluate the differential contributions of individual group members. If the latter was not considered possible, module leaders had to:
• • receive approval from the course leader to exceed the 20% weighting limit, and
  • evaluate the group work assessment (as part of module evaluation) particularly in terms of student perception of fairness.
• Where only the process of group work was assessed, the weighting of the mark could be as high as 100%.

The full report can be downloaded below.

Resource location:  View this resource online