Evaluation of Students in Collaborative Environments
Bruce Kochis
At the 1993 conference on collaborative learning in Seattle, "Hearing Different Voices, Working as One," in the session "Evaluation, Grading and Assessment in Collaborative Contexts," my colleagues Jean MacGregor, Karl Smith, and I were struck by the unevenness in knowledge of and amount of reflection given to the issues of grading in collaborative environments. While some clearly had thought about, say, the distinction between criterion-referenced and norm-referenced evaluation, others had never even heard the terms. Some understood the differences between assessment (formative feedback) and evaluation (summative ranking), others felt lost in the "jargon."
It was also obvious, however, that the topic elicits plenty of anxiety from teachers, especially those engaged in collaborative and interdisciplinary programs and courses. Our session was packed with teachers asking hard questions. How does one reconcile an ethos of cooperation and team-work with an apparent ethos of competition and individualism? And how do we put it all into practice fairly and "objectively"? Should we share the power of grading with students? What really is being graded--aptitude, achievement, potential, effort? Can or should the judgment of the teacher be minimized in favor of scantron-like procedures? Is grading an essential function of teaching or a peripheral one?
The great value of the articles that follow in this section is that they free us from the "tyranny of the one right way" and offer a gamut of approaches that at least partially resolve some of the dilemmas implied in the above questions. We should remind ourselves that the examples that follow were created by teachers struggling with the issues in the context of actual classroom practice. That should encourage all of us to step outside of our normal ways of doing things and struggle with the theory and practice of grading in collaborative environments.