Module 3
Assessing Collaborative Efforts
Education needs to be responsive to the needs of society and that means, among other things, that it has to plan for the education of future work forces. The focus of the workplace has shifted from competition to collaboration. Assessing individual contribution in collaborative work is not an easy task.
An easy solution would be to require every member to identify their part of the assignment, but that could defeat the purpose of the assignment, in effect preventing the members from submitting a truly joint effort. The workplace can offer some ideas to solve this problem. First we would have to decide if the evaluation will be norm referenced or criterion referenced. Once we think of that, the possibility of combinations is evident. One possibility is to give the learners a rubric and let them decide themselves if their work met the requirements and then grade each other’s contribution. They would also evaluate the contributions of their own members. Groups could evaluate the work of the other groups and the instructor could evaluate their evaluations. Members who do not cooperate would have to deal with the evaluation of the other members of their group, but the entire group would not suffer if the grading is a combination of several inputs (the other groups and the instructor’s).
One must also remember that not everyone can work in groups. I have had several autistic students for whom collaboration is just not possible, even though it would be very beneficial for them. Some other provisions have to be made to accommodate those students.
http://www.hayesraffle.com/wp-content/uploads/topoautism.pdf
No comments:
Post a Comment