Assessment and Evaluation of Group Work in Moodle

Group work can produce anxiety for students, and much of that anxiety comes from not knowing how much their grade will be affected by other group members’ performance and engagement, and how much control they have over the end product.

This article presents options or strategies for group work evaluation and provides pros and cons for each as well as resources that can help you apply the strategies. These strategies were adapted from Assessing Group Work from University of South Wales.

Regardless of whether they are individual assignments or group assignments, best practices for graded work include:

  • Ensuring that the criteria used for evaluation aligns with both the stated learning objectives, and are things that students have had the opportunity to learn either in your course or in a prerequisite course.
  • Clearly communicating your expectations and assessment criteria. One very effective way to do this is through your instructions and also through a clear and comprehensive rubric that lists all the criteria and how each will be evaluated. See the Teaching Resources article on Rubric Best Practices, Examples and Templates for more detail on creating rubrics.

Questions unique to group work include:

  • How much can I expect they know about how to function as a team, and how do I assess their ability to do so?
  • What weight should group product vs. group process have in the grade?
  • Should each group member receive the same grade, or different grades?
  • Will I grade them on the entire product, or their particular part of it?
  • What are my expectations for how they will function as a group, and how do I share these and ensure everyone is on the same page?

Grading group work products

Grading the product is much like grading any other assignment. Just like any assignment, providing a rubric for a group will let them know exactly what level of accomplishment for each criteria their product must display in order to receive a given grade. (See Rubric Best Practices, Examples and Templates for more information.)

Grading group work processes

Grading the group work process is more complex. Instructors are unable to observe every group while they work and determine who did what and how well. Common process evaluation practices include grading student contributions through observable evidence (e.g. a Google Doc where you can track contributions, a Moodle forum of which you are a member, Zoom recordings or AI summaries of meetings) and/or asking students to self-evaluate their own participation and the participation of their peers to determine a grade.

A collaboration rubric is important to provide whether you are using observable evidence to determine a grade yourself or if you are asking students to weigh in. Examples of criteria you might include on a collaboration rubric include

  • Participating in constructive dialogue
  • Considering all group members’ perspectives
  • Constructively dealing with conflict in the group or otherwise navigating interpersonal dynamics well
  • Effectively planning and monitoring the progression toward project completion
  • Delegating tasks fairly
  • Sharing knowledge
  • Adjusting to unforeseen circumstances; flexibility
  • Making decisions
  • Building consensus

Note that not all college students have had the opportunity to learn, practice and build these “soft skills.” The companion article “Tips and Strategies for Successful Group Work” offers some resources you might use to help learn these skills. Direct coaching is also very helpful.

Having students assess themselves and their peers can remove the burden of having to mine artifacts to determine group functioning and student contribution. Peer and self-assessment tools:

  • A self evaluation form (make a copy of this one and adjust according to your expectations)
  • A peer evaluation form (make a copy of this one and adjust according to your expectations)
  • Moodle’s Peerwork activity which enables instructors to designate the weight of peer evaluations to the final grade (0-100%) and supply a rubric with which students evaluate each other.

Grading schemes for group work

Grading schemes and calculations differ in their affordances, simplicity vs. complexity, focus and perceptions by students.

Option 1: Group member grades can be wholly inter-dependent: each member receives the same grade based on the group’s work.

Use cases:

  • When group work results in a final product or products like presentations, papers, etc.
  • If grading burden is a consideration, as in large courses with few graders, because of its relative simplicity. 

Considerations:

  • May encourages collaboration since grades are interdependent
  • May be perceived as unfair by students if they feel that the quality of their work is not reflected in their grades because group members contributed unequally to the product.

Tool (s):

Option 2: Group member grades can be wholly in-dependent: each member receives an individual grade for their own work.

Use cases:

  • For evaluating a product where tasks of equal size and complexity are easily identified and assigned to students
  • For evaluating a process when responsibilities and expectations are mutually understood

Considerations:

  • Can motivate and reward individual students as their grades are not interdependent
  • Can be perceived by students as a fair way to be graded
  • Does not encourage true collaboration as students could simply divide up the project and not work with each other beyond delegating tasks
  • You cannot enter different grades for students with group submission in Moodle Assignment, so each student’s grade will have to be manually entered.

Option 3: Group member grades can reflect a combination of inter- and in-dependent components: each member receives an individually-adjusted group grade.

Use cases:

  • Where you want each person’s grade to be based on a combination of the whole group work and their own contribution.
  • For group work where it’s not easy to equally-sized identify individual tasks, or where you want to evaluate a product or process holistically rather than in parts

Considerations:

  • Encourages collaboration as the final work is graded as a whole for quality
  • Likely to be perceived by students as more fair than Option 1.

Tools and methods:

  • Use Moodle’s Peerwork activity. In the activity settings, you’ll designate the relative weight of group vs. individual work for an assignment from each group and determine evaluation criteria. One member of each group will submit the group’s project, and each group member will rate each others’ contributions/participation. Final grades for each member are adjusted by Moodle based on your specifications and added to the gradebook automatically.
  • Grade the group project (as in Option 1) and individual student components (as in Option 2) and individual teamwork (process) (like through a a self evaluation form and a peer evaluation form, making a copy of these adjust according to your expectations, or through direct observation). These grades could be entered as three separate grades in the gradebook or combined into one grade using a rubric.

Resources

Other articles in this series

Further reading