Designing group projects

Good assessment design is one of the best ways you can set you and your students up for success and reduce the occurrence of common issues. In this section, you will find advice on how to design group projects and how to assess them.

There are, of course, several elements of good assessment design that are universal and are not mentioned here (e.g. constructive alignment, rubrics).

1Quick guide

2Finding the sweet spot of project complexity

3Creating supportive project structures for groups

4Balancing group and individual components of the project

5Balancing emphasis on product, process and teamwork

6Incorporating peer and self-assessment

7References

Quick guide

This is an overview of the suggested steps to design group projects, as covered on this page.

Create a project that is challenging enough to motivate students to collaborate, but not so challenging that they become more passive and reliant on high achievers.
Create clear sections within the project that guide students in how to divide the work in a way that encourages collaboration and discourages students from working in isolation or silos of skills.
Include opportunities for recognition of individual contributions to the project, possibly through some individual assessment.
Consider how you can assess process and teamwork in addition to the final product of the project in alignment with learning outcomes.
Incorporate peer and self-assessment to improve the fairness of grades, encourage accountability, and embed reflective practices

Finding the sweet spot of project complexity

Group work projects need to be complex enough that they are beyond the capability of one individual without being so complex students become disheartened.

Goal

The ultimate goal is to craft an achievable yet genuine challenge for groups so they can gain the benefits of working together (Jackson & Williams, 1985).

How to find the sweet spot

One useful technique is to create a project that asks for optimisation (e.g. how can a group find the most effective or elegant solution/design), rather than maximisation (e.g. how can a group find the quickest or biggest solution/design) (Davies, W. M. 2009) to encourage extended collaboration.

Example:

Maximised: create a prototype for a mechanism that can pick up an object of 100 grams.
Optimised: create a prototype for a mechanism that can pick up an object of 100 grams that is durable enough to repeat an action at least 10 times.

In the maximised example, students may get to their objective quicker because they don’t factor in the need for the mechanism to last beyond the first attempt. Adding complexity helps students consider diverse approaches and think more deeply about their project.

‘Social loafing’ and/or ‘free riding’ can occur when students believe the outcome is either beyond their reach or too simple to deserve much attention, so they become more passive and let more engaged student(s) do the bulk of the work (Davies, 2009).

In addition, complex problems also tend to value multiple diverse perspectives by challenging students to explore a range of views, approaches, or solutions before choosing their way forward.

Creating supportive project structures for groups

The best types of projects have identifiable subtopics or sections which guide students in how to fairly and effectively divide up the work. These sections should:

Be somewhat dependent on each other

Be work that students can do in parallel

All contain opportunities to meet the intended learning outcomes

Milestones

Another way to support effective group work assessment is creating multiple assessment components of a project (or “milestones”). This is effective as it:

helps you to detect and support the resolution of major conflict earlier in semester
creates opportunities for a feedback dialogue with and between students
can reduce stress and anxiety of highly weighted, summative group assessments

Balancing group and individual components of the project

To get the most of out of group work, consider a combination grade where students are assessed on their combined group efforts as well as their individual input.

Students can feel more invested when they know their efforts will be noticed and acknowledged.

Watkins, 2005

Individual work

It is important to be aware of the ANU Policy (statement 8), “Group assessment tasks provide students with at least some opportunity to demonstrate their skills as individuals.”. This policy does not imply that an individual assessment component is necessary, but it does require educators to put an appropriate and thoughtful mechanism in place to recognise students’ individual work.

Example with individual grade

Balancing emphasis on product, process and teamwork

A great deal of learning comes from the process of completing a project, but we often only assess the final iteration of the work. Assessing process is a great way to assign value to teamwork and collaboration skills. It can also be a valid way of assessing learning of other discipline-specific skills (e.g. project management, co-design, analysis).

Finding the right balance

There’s no one-size-fits all solution here; the right balance will be determined by the learning outcomes of your course/program and the cohort. For a large first year cohort – for example – you might emphasise the learning process over the quality of the final product.

Tips

Strategies to assess process and teamwork include:

Portfolio of work

Team evaluations

Peer or self-evaluations/reflections

Incorporating peer and self-assessment

Peer assessment or “evaluation” may promote fairness in grading by recognising and rewarding individual contribution to the group project and reducing the occurrence of social loafing (Davies, 2009; Fellenz, 2006).

Peer and self-assessment also represents a powerful opportunity for students to develop their evaluative judgement skills (Tai et al., 2016) and transferrable skills like critical thinking and communication.

Tips

Advice on incorporating peer or self-assessment into a course:

Rubrics

Student practice

Have students provide formative feedback to their peers in relation to group work skills
Give students opportunities to learn and change their behaviour.
Show students how to effectively give, receive, and use feedback (Sridharan & Boud, 2019).
If students are giving a presentation/performance as part of their assessment, have groups present for each other in informal sessions first. This is a good opportunity for students to practice as well as gain valuable peer feedback.

Marking and honesty

In contrast to formative peer feedback, keep summative peer assessments confidential to encourage honesty and consider asking students to provide written justification for any very low or high marks.
Consider how strongly peer assessment will impact the group grade each student receives. Peer evaluations tend to agree within groups (Sprague et al., 2019), but may be somewhat inflated.
Peer assessment should be:
- strong enough to encourage students to take the task of assessing their peers seriously, but
- account for the fact that students are not always the most accurate or honest judges, particularly if they know grades are at stake (Sridharan et al., 2019).
Consider how you will account for self-assessments for group work skills. Students tend to over-inflate their own grades (Sprague et al., 2019) in potentially unequal ways (Sridharan et al., 2019), so you might choose to use this data only to help investigate the cause of discrepancies in peer grading within a group.

References

Davies, W. M. (2009). Groupwork as a form of assessment: Common problems and recommended solutions. Higher Education, 58(4), 563–584. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-009-9216-y

Fellenz, M. R. (2006). Toward Fairness in Assessing Student Groupwork: A Protocol for Peer Evaluation of Individual Contributions. Journal of Management Education, 30(4). https://doi.org/10.1177/1052562906286713

Jackson, J. M., & Williams, K. D. (1985). Social Loafing on Difficult Tasks. Working Collectively Can Improve Performance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 49(4), 937–942. Scopus. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.49.4.937

Sprague, M., Wilson, K. F., & McKenzie, K. S. (2019). Evaluating the quality of peer and self evaluations as measures of student contributions to group projects. Higher Education Research & Development, 38(5), 1061–1074. https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2019.1615417

Sridharan, B., & Boud, D. (2019). The effects of peer judgements on teamwork and self-assessment ability in collaborative group work. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 44(6), 894–909. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2018.1545898

Tai, J. H.-M., Canny, B. J., Haines, T. P., & Molloy, E. K. (2016). The role of peer-assisted learning in building evaluative judgement: Opportunities in clinical medical education. Advances in Health Sciences Education: Theory and Practice, 21(3), 659–676. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10459-015-9659-0

Watkins, R. (2005). Groupwork and Assessment. In The Handbook for Economics Lecturers. The Economics Network. https://doi.org/10.53593/n380a

In this collection

Quick guide

Finding the sweet spot of project complexity

Goal

How to find the sweet spot

What causes social loafing?

Creating supportive project structures for groups

Milestones

Balancing group and individual components of the project

Individual work

Balancing emphasis on product, process and teamwork

Finding the right balance

Tips

Incorporating peer and self-assessment

Tips

References