Group Projects and Group Grading: Work in Progress
Roger
Arango
| When students produce projects collaboratively, how should they be graded? This instructor of public administration describes a group project he designed and then graded in three ways: he gave a group grade, students graded their own effort, and students graded others in their groups. |
My experience in group projects where students receive a single grade for the group's effort is based on teaching public administration at Heritage College. Heritage College is a small liberal arts college with a non-traditional student body in a non-traditional setting. Located in the hops fields three miles west of Toppenish, Washington, its student body is roughly 20 percent Native American, 25 percent Hispanic, and 50 percent Anglo. Seventy percent of the students are women and the average age of the student body is 35. My observation of these students' interactions prompted my interest in group projects. I found some students, especially those who came from more traditional Native American and Hispanic cultures, seemed to be passive learners and appeared not to engage in classroom discussions-with either their peers or me. I noticed, however, that these same students would participate in animated discussions in smaller group settings outside the classroom. I thought I could structure some classroom activities which would provide them an opportunity to engage more actively with the course content and their peers.
Resolving a Preliminary Issue
As I thought about a group project and reflected on giving a group grade, I had to confront a personal issue: assuming a grade should reflect the student's individual performance, I questioned the appropriateness of awarding each student a grade based on the group's effort. In part, my reservation was based on student comments such as, "______ didn't do any work on the project. It isn't fair that he should get our grade when we did all the work." I decided in favor of a group graded project by first resolving my personal reservation. The resolution went something like this: First, a small group setting might provide a vehicle to get the passive, non-traditional learners more actively involved with their peers. Second, "real life" requires disparate people to work in a group to produce some output which, in turn, will be evaluated by someone else. Thus, students need to gain experience in working collaboratively (and perhaps finding out that individuals within the group may be unfairly rewarded). These two considerations outweighed my personal reservation and convinced me to go ahead and try group graded projects. If you aren't "philosophically" committed to group graded projects, I don't think they will work for you.
How the Project Worked: Design and Intended Outcomes
I decided to try a group project in my 200 level course, Introduction to Public Administration. Students, working in teams of three or four, would assume the role of a stakeholder in a local controversial issue, research the issue from that stakeholder's perspective, develop a policy position, and then reach consensus on recommendations by negotiating with the other stakeholders in their groups. As the major outcome, I wanted students to understand policy formulation as compromise among competing issues. They would do so by engaging collaboratively in group activity.
Developing the Group Grade. The next step was to sell the students on the group grading scheme. As the group project was forty percent of the total grade, the students were quite apprehensive. I asked the class to assess personally how they might perform in a group project wherein they would all receive the same grade. Most students saw the merits of group projects-but were less enthusiastic about receiving a group grade. After some class discussion of student concerns, I proposed a scheme that would provide three separate evaluations: First, I would give a grade for the group's work. Second, the students would provide a grade for their own effort. Third, all students would grade the performance of the other students in their groups. The final grade would be equally based on all three components. The last point seemed to address the students' concerns that someone might not put forward the appropriate degree of effort. We thus reached consensus on the composition of the group grade.
Preparing the Students. I assigned a series of articles which described the ways working groups, commissions and blue ribbon panels study problems and arrive at policy alternatives. We discussed these articles from the standpoint of both the process used by each interagency group and its product of policy statements. I specifically asked the students to focus on the political roles of the working group member as a representative of a constituency and as a negotiator for an agency position.
Selecting and Conducting the Project. I wanted the class to buy into a project that would personally engage them, so I asked the students to nominate three local public policy issues. We sorted through the nominations and decided on a project which would require the group to project land use in accordance with Washington's Growth Management Act. The student groups were constituted as a planning group whose charter was to provide substantiated recommendations on land use to the county commissioners. Individual group members role-played as representatives of the Yakima Indian Nation, the county economic development office, the Washington Grower's League, county transportation office, and conservation organizations. The group task was to mediate among the individual members' recommended policies and researched support in order to propose land use recommendations which would be acceptable to all represented constituencies. Because similar "real life" planning groups were meeting around the valley as the class met, the actual stakeholders were able to visit the class to discuss the issues central to them and the processes they employed to support their positions and urge their case. The local Conference of Governments was a valuable resource, both for me to structure the project and for students to use in their research.
Evaluation Criteria. Once we selected the project, I had to decide on the criteria by which to evaluate the students' projects. I attempted to identify criteria which would permit me to assign grades to both individuals and groups. I selected the following criteria:
o The relevance of the material students used to support their recommendation,
o The coherence of the land-use recommendation,
o The process by which consensus was achieved within the working group,
o A written evaluation of the project in which I asked the students to discuss their perception of the quality of the outcome, and
o An oral presentation by each student of his/her paper.
Actual Project Outcomes. The comments in the student evaluation papers confirmed their appreciation of the importance of buying into the problem: " . . . we actually did something that other people are doing right now." Oral feedback from the students on the project was uniformly positive except for the difficulty they noted in assigning grades to their colleagues. They felt they better understood the difficulties of attempting to resolve a highly political problem within a working group. Quieter students, regardless of cultural background, appeared to participate more actively in the group project than they did in open classroom discussions. Finally, involving the students in an evaluation scheme also reinforced for the students one of my major teaching points in the course-the importance of evaluation as a component of any project.
An Unintended Outcome: The Role of Personality. A related issue in student preparation was the role of personality in group interaction. I had earlier in the course administered and explained the Myers-Briggs Personality Inventory. Several students commented on the role that personalities played in the group project. They felt they had gained an appreciation for other people's problem solving styles. The end-of-term course evaluations commented favorably on this aspect of the group project and also suggested that students paid more attention to personality as they proceeded in the course. This outcome was unintended, but, I think, very valuable.
Project Revision: Trying Again
I conducted a second group project the following year which allowed me to deal with two issues. First, I asked the students in their written evaluations of the project to comment specifically about the role of personality in their group interactions. Second, even though students saw the real life benefits of group projects, they were still concerned about grade fairness which, in turn, they equated with equal effort expended on the project. I addressed this issue in the second project by involving the students more in the evaluation design, specifically, by letting them identify and agree upon specific written criteria they would use in their peer evaluations. One note of caution here: the criteria they developed focused on quantitative indicators of their peers' contributions such as timeliness of submissions and attendance rather than the quality of their peers' work. I felt we never adequately developed qualitative criteria for the peer evaluations; however, the students were satisfied so we went forward.
Some Final Thoughts
Preparing for an extensive group project is extraordinarily time-consuming in terms of administering and explaining the Myers-Briggs Personality Inventory, identifying and selecting a project, and reaching consensus on the evaluation criteria. It is especially difficult to find case studies which adequately developed the personality types of the participants; in retrospect, I feel I would have done better to write my own case study (or better yet to videotape a case study). On the other hand, I feel the students were more deeply involved in, and engaged with the course content. They also developed a better understanding of the human interaction in group processes based on individual personality styles. Finally, they better understood the real difficulty in resolving a complex, value-laden issue.