Description

Work in the biological sciences - in industry and academia, research and business - typically involves teamwork and collaboration.

Groupwork is so fundamental to everything we do now - even with research grants, we're often advised to form large collaborative groups.  People working in government agencies work in large teams of some sort, the same with private enterprise. [academic]

The increasing prevalence of group projects in biological science courses provides students with opportunities to develop these teamwork skills. The approaches taken in assessing groupwork are varied, and may involve the assessment of a project's outcome (or 'product'), the effectiveness of the group processes employed, or both.

Approaches

It is common for students to work collaboratively in biological science courses - during class time such as in laboratory classes, fieldwork and tutorials, and during out of class study when preparing group-based assignments. Some groupwork is assessed, with group assignments, or projects, being an obvious example.

We found that the following features characterise groupwork assessment in the biological sciences:

• Many group projects involve presentations [see also: Presentations];
• Group projects often involve research - literature-based, practical, or both;
• Group projects may include individual work that is individually assessed (e.g. research projects that combine group research and data collection, with individual report preparation);
• For many projects, a component of the assessment targets group process, and this typically involves peer assessment [see also: Peer and self-assessment]; and
• Groupwork is common at all year levels, including first year.

The various approaches to grading groupwork include:

• Single grade awarded - i.e. each person receives same grade, usually based on the final product [Example: Pane];
• Single grade determined, then modified ('weighted') on the basis of peer assessment of individual contributions [Examples: Bird; Fairweather 1; Hargreaves 2];
• Grade determined by a combination of group mark and individual mark, usually involving different components - for example, presentation (group) and written report (individual) [Example: Walker 2]; and
• Individual grades based on each students' individual work (i.e. product, such as a written report) - yet the preparation for this also involved an element of group work [Example: Wassens 2].

This list is not exhaustive. Indeed, we were told of some rather novel approaches to assigning grades. For example: a group project, involving an oral presentation, in which only some of the group actually present. Each presenter is awarded an individual grade, while the others each receive an average of the presenters' grades [Example: May]. This would have the effect of recognising and rewarding those individuals who chose to present, while also encouraging the remaining group members to support the presenters.

Feedback

A feature of groupwork, irrespective of how it is formally assessed, is that it encourages peer learning - students within a group learning together, and providing one another with feedback during the process.

I worked in a group of 6 to 8 students in 3rd year to answer assignment problems and to prepare for exams. The lecturer encouraged discussion about assignment questions as long as the write-up was done individually. I found it helped my learning if I explained answers to others [final year undergraduate student describing assessment that was useful for learning]

I learnt a lot from PBL tutorials. They were the best tutorials ever. We worked together to analyse a problem and work out a solution [post-graduate student describing experience as an undergraduate student]

It was really good to work in pairs for practical classes [post-graduate student describing experience as an undergraduate student]

Formalised peer feedback is also common, and may extend beyond estimates of percentage contribution, to evaluation against specific criteria. In addition, group work often involves presentation and therefore opportunities for class wide discussion and feedback.

Issues and strategies - regarding assessment

The key considerations in planning groupwork assessment are:

• Deciding what is to be assessed - the process, the product, or both;
• Selecting criteria, particularly if the group process is to be directly assessed;
• Deciding who is to 'do' the assessing - staff, students or both; and
• Deciding how grades are to be assigned - collectively, individually, or a mixture.

These issues are elaborated in the Assessing Learning in Australian Universities website. Here we describe the particular issues that are concerning staff and students in the biological sciences, and the strategies used to address these.

1. Equity in terms of 'reward for effort'

We found that the key issue for assessment of groups is the equity of grading in terms of reward for individual contribution. Some staff told us that they avoid groupwork for this reason:

 I don't use groupwork myself because it's hard to assess... you just don't get a feeling for who did it, who wrote it. [academic]

Students also express concerns about unequal contributions:

I remember doing a lot of group stuff through the first and second year, like group posters. It was a group of five people and you presented the poster in your lab class. You go off, you get a couple of weeks to work on it and you present this poster on cardboard and you bring it back to the group, you present your results.  Like, while that's good for working with other people, the actual assessment can be a little bit unfair if you've done a lot of the work. Often in those groups there are people that will do a lot more of the work and I'm not sure that it was a fair assessment.  It probably wasn't worth much and it was probably more to get people working together and presenting.  But in terms of the actual assessment, I'm not sure it was the fairest way to do it. [postgraduate student, describing experience of group projects as an undergraduate student]

Based on the design of group projects described to us, it appears that the issue of 'reward for effort' is being addressed in two ways:

a. Peer assessment of contribution

It is common for group projects to include a component of peer assessment, whereby each student either:

• Estimates the proportional contribution of each group member, including their own [Example: Fairweather 1]; or
• Evaluates the contribution of each group member against explicit criteria [Examples: Kleindorfer; Macaulay].

Peer assessment of group work typically focuses on 'process', rather than 'product'. For example, how well a student contributed to discussion and whether or not they contributed their 'fair share' of the work, rather than the actual quality of the part (e.g. written section; oral presentation) that they were responsible for producing. It is also argued that peer assessment should be incorporated into groupwork as this reflects the situation in the workplace:

Everybody gets to mark everybody else, including themselves, for a small component which weights the overall mark. It doesn't decide the overall mark. But it actually either confirms or doesn't the impression that the staff member associated with that group has. So we give them some scope for peer assessment. We tell them that on the job there are also ways in which you are assessed, sometimes formally sometimes not. But you do need to be a contributing member of the team and you need to seek the feedback from the team about the contributions to actually know how you're going. And so formalizing that, and giving a small weighting to the mark, is the way in which we manage that. Now, that's very confronting for a lot of students - and it's confronting for the people who probably would be cutting all the corners that they could possibly find. The people who are extremely diligent, they get upset that there isn't a bigger weighting! [academic describing groupwork assessment in first year subject]

While such peer review strategies are relatively simple to implement, they do not automatically discriminate between students:

For a group assignment I ask the students "what do you think your contribution was?", "what sort of a role have you played", "what percentage would you give to it?", and "what contribution have the others made?.  So based on that, I get far more information (about the groups).  But generally they just give you, if you have a group of four, 25%, 25%, 25%, 25%. [academic describing groupwork assessment at all year levels]

However, simply providing a mechanism to encourage shared effort and for students to identify 'problems', if necessary, may be more important than discriminating between individual grades.

[see also: Peer and self-assessment]

b. Combining group project processes with individual assessment

Another common strategy combines groupwork and individual assessment. For example:

• A field-based project in which the data collected by 40 students is pooled, analysed and discussed as a group, then variously used by students as the basis for individual reports, allowing students to focus on aspects of individual interest [Example: Postgrads 2]; and
• A third year subject assessed entirely on the basis of a semester-long, group-based project. Students work in small groups to design a study, collect and analyse data. Their final reports, however, are produced individually [Example: Mulder 1].

In such strategies, assessment is of the product directly, and the group process only indirectly - the assumption being that the more effective the group, the more individuals will benefit in producing their individual work.

2. The need to match the task, and intended learning, with groupwork

A second issue to emerge from our interviews concerned the use of groupwork for tasks that might be better suited to individual work. Specifically, students questioned the value of group projects where a task, such as preparing a paper or presentation, was divided between group members. That is, where there seemed little 'group process' involved beyond apportioning various 'bits' of the project and then assembling them to produce a single product. There was concern:

• about the limited control each student had over the overall quality of the work; and
• that this limited the learning that was possible from the exercise:

I think that you can pick up more from an exercise if you have to go through the process from start to finish yourself.  Like, if you're writing a large report, and you only write the methods or the intro, I don't think you get as much out of it as if you can collect data with everybody, and the write-up and the analysis - you can talk about it with everyone, but you have to do the grunt of it yourself.  Then you get an idea of what it is to write the intro and the methods, and making it all link up, and what a discussion is.  Even if you can go back to your mates and say, "what did you get from this table?" or, "I'm having trouble putting this data in a graph - what have you done?" - you're still doing it yourself.  [postgraduate student]

It is likely that the use of combined groupwork and individual tasks is, in part, a response to such concerns.

We were also told of situations where groupwork was used primarily in order to reduce the assessment load on staff, in light of increasing class size.

The students all write up a mini-paper, and it's one hell of a lot of marking. Recently, out of sheer desperation with growing student numbers, I've been giving the assignment as groups of three or four people ... so instead of getting 60 assignments to mark, I can go down to 15 ... the students might partition it [the writing task] out by somebody doing the introduction and methods, and somebody doing the results and graph analysis, and somebody doing the discussion ... it's not really very satisfactory. I'm not claiming this is the answer. [academic discussing third-year teaching]

The practical constraints of time and resources are clearly an important issue in curriculum design, and are discussed elsewhere [see also: Coping with resource constraints].

Other, general issues regarding groupwork

3. Group membership

There are various approaches to forming groups, for example:

1. students choose, principally on the basis of friendship;
2. students choose, seeking to join with students who are recognised as high achievers or having complementary skills;
3. the first choice is of topic, and the groups are then constructed from students who have a shared interest;
4. group membership is determined by random allocation (coordinated by staff); or
5. groups are constructed by staff to deliberately combine students of differing/similar abilities or characteristics (including gender).

While no single approach is best in all situations, the most common approaches to group formation for project work described were c) and d).

Grouping on the basis of shared interest in a topic, c), has obvious benefits in terms of student engagement and can help overcome the difficulties inherent in allowing friendship alone to drive group formation [see also: Student motivation].

Random allocation, d), is favoured by some staff as it is seen to most closely mirror the workplace situation, where people typically have limited control over the membership of the teams that they work with:

So they're seeing the sort of personalities, and responding to the personalities, that may or may not contribute better in teams. Of course, when you get out there in the real world you have no say in who you're working with. [academic]

For my environmental science students I look at the sorts of jobs that an entry-level environmental scientist would do, that one of our graduates would do.  I try and mimic the kinds of tasks.  If I know that in their work life they'll be working in groups that they have no say in, I'll organise groups for them that they have no say in so they learn some of the skills that you need to develop when you're working with groups of people that you haven't necessarily chosen to work with. ... it's not uncommon for (workplace) teams to have dysfunctional elements.  So quite often we just randomly associate our students into groups for some of the group work activities and see how that goes. [academic]

The issues of group membership, roles and the logistics of scheduling group meetings are elaborated further in the Assessing Learning in Australian Universities website.

4. Providing guidance

The need to provide students with guidance in the formation, management and monitoring of group projects was emphasised by many of the academic staff and students interviewed. It was stressed that simply allocating students to groups and providing a description of the task and the assessment criteria was not enough - rather, it is necessary to:

• ensure that the purpose of the group project is made explicit.

This is an important step in designing the task in the first instance (see above). It is also important that the logic is made clear to students. Why is it necessary for this to be a group project? How does the group task and the assessment relate to the learning objectives?

• provide guidance and a structure for groups to use in managing the task.

This includes consideration of the differing skills, availability and interests of each group member in planning the project. It might also involve identified project phases and targets, determined by the group or incorporated in the assessment design [Examples: Kleindorfer; Meyer; Mulder 1].

Generic skills

The following generic skills are associated with groupwork. Whether or not they are directly assessed, each is likely to be enhanced by working in groups. Where there is direct assessment, students can be made more aware of the importance of these skills. Direct assessment would typically involve peer and self-assessment.

Team work skills

The development of team work skills is commonly cited as the principal reason for including group projects in university courses.

To enhance students' development of team work skills requires that they appreciate the importance of group dynamics and the need for group management, and have an opportunity to reflect upon their groups' processes. Strategies used to achieve this include:

• explicit guidelines and discussion of  group management [Example: Meyer];
• mechanisms for seeking assistance should difficulties arise; and
• formalised processes that encourage evaluation of group effectiveness.

Time management

Time management is one of the major challenges presented by group projects - scheduling meetings, coordinating research efforts, balancing the project work with other studies and commitments. For this reason, group projects raise students' awareness of the importance of planning and can help them to improve their time management skills [Example: Kleindorfer].

Interpersonal communication

Group work, whether in the form of assessed project work or more informal and short term arrangements in class, provide valuable opportunities to develop skills of interpersonal communication.

Authentic assessment

The degree to which group projects represent authentic project work in the biological sciences is contestable. On the one hand, team work is an increasingly common practice in the discipline, and often includes elements of research, reporting and presentation. To this extent, many group projects do mirror the practice of biology. On the other hand, workplace teams typically rely upon a degree of hierarchy - ultimately, one person, or a small 'committee', will have the editorial authority, for example, or will have the responsibility for directing the project. There will be explicit team leadership and furthermore, team members will be chosen for their particular expertise. These are not usually features of university group projects, where the group structure is more likely to be 'flat'. There may be a leader, but there is typically a strong emphasis on ensuring equality in contributions.