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The principles have been summarised and synthesised from the following sources:
Professor Graham Gibbs, "The assessment of group work: lessons from the literature", Brookes groupwork Gibbs Dec 09 (plymouth.ac.uk)
David W Johnson, Roger T Johnson, Karl A. Smith, "Active Learning: Cooperation in the College Classroom", (PDF) Active Learning: Cooperation in the College Classroom (researchgate.net)
Claire Scoular, Daniel Duckworth, Jonathan Heard, & Dara Ramalingam, (2020). Collaboration: Skill development framework. Australian Council for Educational Research. https://research/acer/edu.au/ar_misc/42 viewcontent.cgi (acer.edu.au)
Tasks need to be sufficiently complex that multiple contributors are necessary
Tasks need to be sufficiently complex that multiple contributors are necessary
This will prevent stronger students from taking over and doing it all themselves.
As it is more complex, consider that success indicates more capacity, so rubrics need to reflect higher standard, or grading/scoring will skew too high.
Tasks must have individual components to make individual performance visible and rewarded
Tasks must have individual components to make individual performance visible and rewarded
This mitigates riding and rewards effort. It also allows for differentiated scoring and grading in addition to group components.
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Allocating People to groups
Random versus calculated. There are costs and benefits of both.
In most cases no more than 2-6 members.
Research has found the following:
Heterogeneous groups are better for student skill development and have better results in a long term group project (over eight weeks).
More homogeneous groups better for the short term (two or three weeks).
For EALD student groups that share a language, working in the first language prior to producing work in English is very productive and enables students to understand concepts better and increase bilingual facility, so don't repress that.
Beware of unintended streaming, that is if all the smart kids are accidently in one group, as that might undermine the sharing of research or distort scoring. If you intend to cluster by ability, plan for it with scaffolding or varied challenge in tasks.
Some groups may require much more teacher intervention than others depending on the distribution of ability.
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Tick, tock. Think about scheduling.
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Complex Tasks need time and teacher feedback at the formative stage
Allocate sufficient time for negotiating and trial and error. Failure is an important part of learning.
Allocate class time to allow for formative learning/ assessment and develop of capacity.
Provide opportunities for the teacher to provide feedback on interim outcomes and during the process.
Opportunities to develop basics to apply in tasks
A strategy is needed for students to develop basic skills, knowledge that might be needed for tasks to be completed well, and to then test their understanding in the final product. Discovering skills by themselves can be very time consuming. It is probably better to provide episodes of explicit instruction during group projects to ensure students gain skills efficiently.
Such as:
In the first phase of a group project, provide pre-learning with explicit teacher instruction, or readings / videos.
Provide time in collaborative task for learning key skills and knowledge with 'just in time teaching'
Design tasks to integrate assessment, synthesis, of knowledge, skills and understanding in the final product, which is the result of combining periods of explicit instruction, just in time teaching and student discovery
Practice makes perfect, maybe.
Students need a chance to learn and practice group skills
Students need a chance to practice group skills before it counts. It would not be fair for the first time they use groupwork skills to be in a high stakes assessment task.
There are many ways to do this. Such as:
Explicit teaching of models for collaboration and team work- e.g. de Bono hats, role allocation and revolving roles
Formative group activities to build capacity and trust in group work processes and members.
Complex Tasks Can Assess a lot of the Curriculum
Complex Tasks Can Assess a lot of the Curriculum
In completing complex tasks, students apply skills and knowledge to produce or create the nominated assessment item. The final product will demonstrate the knowledge and skills. A well designed task can provide a lot of data about a student's understanding of fundamental information and theory.
How can an understanding of, or capacity with, skills and knowledge be demonstrated fully unless they are applied in a meaningful task?
Complex tasks have a lot of steps and so skills and thinking to observe.
Activity 4.1
Activity 4.1
Which of these principles do you think is most significant?
Which of these principles do you think is most significant?
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