Assessment of Cooperative Learning
In a sense, you have already begun assessment as you monitor the groups' progress during the exercise. However, you will also be conducting formal assessment and grades are a great motivator, with great potential for adding interdependence and individual accountability to a project.
Group Accountability
Group grading can save an instructor lots of time, but fair grades require careful monitoring during the project to make sure that all students are participating.
In order to make sure that all students are working towards the same set of standards, it is helpful to provide a detailed description (possibly a rubric or checklist) of how the project will be graded.
Gradable group products could be papers, presentations, posters.
Individual Accountability
In many or most cooperative-learning classes, students still take individual tests or quizzes (in part to make sure that everyone is doing the reading). They can also do individual projects.
It is also possible to make individual accountability part of your group-work monitoring. Periodically request random student reports or oral exams (graded at the instructor's discretion)
- When setting up groups, have the students within each group count off. So in each group, one student has the number "1", another the number "2", and so on.
- At an appropriate point in the exercise, walk up to a group and pick a number at random and that person must report on the group's progress or answer a question about what the group is doing.
Group projects can also result individual products. In Peer review, for example, the paper is the responsibility of the author, and sometimes the reviewers comments on their own are also subject to grading.
Peer Assessment
Kaufman et al., 1999 have students do peer evaluations of their groupmates at the end of term and these correlate closely with test scores that were being used to assess students individually. Such evaluations could be used as part of the students' grades.
