Some professors resist using teamwork in their classes because they mistakenly believe that team projects are too difficult to grade. One problem is that, as educators, we often grade a team presentation, project, or paper solely on how well the team achieved our learning goals.
However, the final single project evaluation may allow some members to free ride on teammates who work harder, or allow one aggressive or dominant member to take over the entire project to ensure the team gets an A. If we only grade team projects at the end, it will be too late for our student teams to adapt or adjust and learn how to work better as a team, which is a key skill employers are looking for in our graduates.
The key to effectively scoring teamwork is to systematically establish a scoring process at the beginning of the project. In this article, we provide four ways to effectively grade team projects to achieve your learning goals and help students become better team members.
- Share your rubric at the beginning of the assignment. Students need to know how they will be graded at the beginning of their team project. Many top students tell us that they hate group projects because they know they have to deal with “social slackers” who rely on one or two people to get the job done. However, by sharing a rubric that emphasizes what is expected of each team member and how to combine individual and team grading, you can help students make more intentional decisions about how to assign assignment requirements. Not only do we distribute the rubric at the beginning of the program, we post it on our course management system and review it frequently with the class so that our expectations are clear.
- Make peer evaluation part of the evaluation process. Sometimes students are asked to rate other team members, but they are rarely taught how to do this job well. Therefore, they often provide only positive feedback to avoid conflict or hurting other students’ feelings. Teaching peer feedback requires very little class time, just 15 minutes. Start by clarifying your expectations for how peer feedback will be used. You can use or create a form that allows students to provide quantitative and qualitative feedback, and then you should use the same form multiple times during the project. The first time peer feedback is collected should be in a low-stakes or practice situation early in the project so that students have a psychologically safe opportunity to learn how to use it. Your students should start with a self-assessment and then assess their classmates.
Next, you’ll summarize the peer feedback and provide the results to individual students so they know how they performed. Finally, have the group reflect on the group’s performance without naming or shaming others. Sometimes, students must provide feedback to someone who is free riding or slacking off. When they do, make sure they know to first ask the person for permission before providing feedback, then publicly praise them, and finally provide any negative feedback privately. Finally, we have a YouTube video that teachers can play in class to help students understand how to give and receive feedback.
- Incorporate ongoing feedback from instructors. We know of teachers who have assigned group assignments and then not mentioned them again until a week before the project deadline. This sets the student team up for failure. Teachers need to be in frequent contact with their teams to ensure their work is progressing and any questions or concerns are answered. By the end of the course, teams spending just five minutes meeting can reap huge rewards in better project products. This instructor feedback can include a way to hold individual team members accountable for the work they are doing. For example, we have a separate Google folder for each team that has instructor access. Each team member is required to post their contribution to the team project on a weekly basis. This way we can keep an eye on any social hangers out and provide feedback to those who are working independently rather than with a team. Instructors can also schedule brief time to participate in team meetings so that they get a more comprehensive and up-to-date information about the project and who is working on each outcome.
- Think carefully about the value you place on each phase of your project. Peer evaluations and teacher evaluations (on how well the project meets learning objectives) must be factored into the final grade; both are important. However, the weighting of these different assessments tells students the importance of each assessment. A greater emphasis on individual peer evaluations emphasizes individual work, whereas a greater emphasis on project mentor ratings signals a greater emphasis on team efforts. At least use the 80/20 rule: at least 20% of a student’s grade should be based on each item.
Also, be sure to check peer reviews to verify that they come from real actions and not personal bias. We achieve this by seeking consistency in the timing of assessments, among team members, and between peer and self-assessments. For the most part, we found that assessments were consistent across all three domains (although self-assessments were often inflated). On the rare occasion when they do not align, we always refer to supporting documentation such as agendas, meeting minutes and our ongoing check-ins to help understand the cause of any inconsistencies.
Grading team projects may seem like a daunting challenge, but grading is never a reason to avoid giving students experience working with a team. By following these four principles for assessing teamwork, teachers can illustrate how well teams achieve learning goals and provide students with valuable teamwork experience that they can use in future courses, internships, collaborations, and employment.
