Click here to view the video transcript
What strategies do you use to clearly communicate assessment criteria and expectations to your learners? Seenan Gidal described, “The goal is to collect as much evidence as possible in a validation process and to identify variables and factors that inform it.” So to that end, thinking about what are all of the pieces of information that would help tell you how students are meeting the learning outcomes in your course. Students commonly have concerns around, are their marks going to be dragged down by people who are not working in their group, or are they going to pull up the marks of other people who are not pulling their own weight? So both of those situations are ones that we can help address through peer-to-peer feedback.
And peer-to-peer feedback prompts might include open-ended sentences and providing a little bit of structure for students so they know how to respond to each other and provide supportive and helpful feedback. Some of these prompts might be, “I found it helpful when you,” insert answer here. “I found it challenging for us when,” insert challenge here, or using a stoplight or traffic light metaphor with stop, start, continue. What’s a practice that we’re doing as a group that’s not effective, that we should stop? What’s a practice that we need to keep doing that’s working really well for us? So let’s continue. And then what do we need to start? What’s something new that we need to bring into our routines and habits as a group that will help us be more effective at meeting the learning outcomes of the course? All of these are ways of scaffolding or supporting students with rubrics or these prompts to help improve the quality of peer assessment or self-assessment.
The validity of groups assessment requires evidence collected from a variety of sources, processes, and opportunities for students to implement skills and behaviours (St-Onge et al., 2017). Consider what combination of self, peer, group, and instructor-guided assessment will tell the learner’s full story through the process of groupwork and the culminating product it creates.
Assessment of group work is improved when it is scaffolded. Scaffolding, or supports around learning, improve the quality of self and peer assessment. Some examples of scaffolding might be:
- Having assessment schemes set up ahead of group work to bring clarity and focus to the purpose of the group work.
- Providing students with a qualitative rubric for assessing their peers to express specific properties of the desired skills and behaviours.
- Providing students with open ended sentence prompts to start feedback conversations such as:
- I found it helpful that you…because…
- I found it challenging when you…because…
- How might we [stop/start/continue] to…
- Suggesting a structured way for students to evaluate the progress of their group work using either the ‘traffic light’ metaphor or a Stop/Continue/Start framework.
- Stop: What is one practice we do as a group that is not effective and that we should stop doing?
- Continue: What is one practice that is working well and that we should continue?
- Start: What new routines or habits should we start as a group to help us work more efficiently?
Optional: Using Generative AI for Group Work
Consider if you want your students to use generative AI to support their group work. One way to use AI could be to ask each student to contribute their initial ideas or workflow preferences individually, using a group chat option which some chatbots offer. Then invite the students to use AI to organize and synthesize the full group’s input into a working plan. Students should review and discuss the AI output to finalize their group workflow. Help students practice co-creation with care, starting from the idea that all group members have valuable ideas. Invite students to ask questions such as ‘What ideas feel overrepresented or overlooked?’, ‘What doesn’t quite work?’, ‘What should we keep, question, or revise?’. This idea was inspired by Carter Moulton’s Analog Inspiration cards.
St-Onge, C., Young, M., Eva, K. W., & Hodges, B. (2017). Validity: One word with a plurality of meanings. Advances in Health Sciences Education, 22(4), 853–867. British Columbia Institute of Technology Learning and Teaching Centre. (2010). Effective use of group work [Instructional job aid].
Discussions
What strategies do you use to clearly communicate assessment criteria and expectations to your students?
Please share your thoughts and questions in the comments section below.