The Center for Teaching Innovation (CTI) at Cornell University has explored how educational experiences that are active, social, contextual, engaging, and student-owned lead to deeper learning. Collaboration offers all of these and more as it increases peer-to-peer and student-to-instructor interaction and develops better communication and collaborative critical thinking skills. This is achieved insofar as the instructor is able to apply some of the suggestions by CTI:
Apart from this, it is important to also understand the instructor’s role in the facilitation of the collaboration by students. To do this, one needs to assess three components of collaborative assignments: Creating, Organizing, and Evaluating.
Most assignments can be collaborative assignments as long as the deliverable has a clear learning outcome associated with both collaboration and the assignment. A collaborative assignment needs to have set guidelines throughout the process. For example,
Building capacity and support is the ability to create conditions, opportunities and experiences for collaboration and mutual learning.
The assignment and learning outcomes should provide a framework to approaching organizing groups. While instructors might gravitate to arrange groups according to several collaborative learning outcomes that look at creating the most diverse groups, this may be a difficult task to accomplish as some lead to bias interpretations of what diversity is. To offset this, instructors should approach organization of groups on the expectations that there will be a shared and distributed interdependence across all group members.
Just as creating and organizing are important to the success of the collaborative assignment, so is the assessment. The assessment of the collaborative assignment is dependent on the effectiveness of the instructor’s ability to provide clear guidelines for the collaboration. While it is simple to assess the final product, collaborative writing assignments should be assessed holistically - the process, the instructor, and peer interaction.
Why grade the process rather than the output?
If the output of the assignment is prioritized in the assessment, it offers little incentive for individual students to help manage group interaction and instead focuses on getting the assignment done. By changing the focus to the process of the collaboration, students feel more inclined to learn through every stage of the process and create better output.
How to evaluate individual performance by individuals?
Students may at times feel that their contribution to the assignment may be clouded when everyone receives the same grade. This may seem unfair when specific channels of assessment are incorporated throughout the process of the collaboration. From establishing self-reflective assessment to peer assessment can foster a sense of interdependence.
Sources: