Assessing Teamwork

Assessing team assignments is a difficult task.  A variety of approaches are available, but no single approach is the best fit. Many factors must be balanced when assessing team assignments, such as your time as an instructor for assessing assignments, the support you do (or do not) have in terms of TAs, the weight of the assignment on the overall grade, and many others.  Just because it is a team assignment does not necessarily mean it is a team grade.  Some instructors grade each student individually on a team assignment, while others are on the other end of the scale and simply assign a single team grade.  Other instructors sit somewhere near the middle of the scale, awarding both a team and individual grade.  Let’s examine some of the strategies for assessing team assignments.

Much of this section is derived from James, McInnis and Devlin’s (2002) work, Assessing Learning in Australian Universities.