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Send to friendStudent views on the assessment of a group assignment
Field trip for 40 students
Groupwork leading to individual assessment
A group of postgrad students said they particularly liked and remembered the assessment of a third year ecological methods field trip. Students from a range of disciplines worked in groups to gather data, but their reports were assessed individually. One student said,
"there was just massive data sets, vegetation and invertebrate pitfalls and mammal trapping. ... Everyone was collecting data for animals as well as plants and then analysing it or going through it every night on the field trip."
The data were then pooled and analyzed as a class so that each member of the class had access to a full set of results. Students could select which aspects of the class data they used to write their own individual reports. A second postgrad student said,
I looked at Lantana weed and its distribution ... related to footpaths I think. Like, so, Was it a human disturbance thing? Is that how the weeds get into the bush? ... Other people did things on when and why people left towels on the balcony. You could just basically do it on any - it was getting to the process of observing something in the field and then getting a hypothesis about why you thought that was the way it was, and then collecting the data and then analysing it and presenting your results.
Each student was assessed individually on his/her report.
The postgraduate students said they found groupwork to be a useful experience as it forced them to cooperate, and gave them an insight into working in the real world, but they noted that the assessment of undergraduate groupwork sometimes poses problems with grading an individual's effort fairly.
Students liked the use of groupwork on the fieldtrip as it increased their access to useful data, whilst the fact that their reports were marked individually meant that each group member's work was acknowledged.
