Group work as a condition

Assessing group work can develop positive student behaviours and skills such as communication, critical reflection and accountability. Any of these could contribute to the final grade: 

• a reflective individual piece on the student’s role, contribution or experience. 
• a group account of roles and contributions, or notes/minutes from group meetings. 
• observation of groups by the teacher during class. 

Students may appreciate developing professional skills, and closer connections to their peers (Telling, 2024).  

• Students may not have previously practiced collaborative skills, as individual assessment is more common, and students are wary of collusion (Sutton & Taylor, 2010).  
• Students may see marking on a group assessment task as unfair (because other students could affect their marks, or because the task is more complex and less familiar than most individual assessments). Having less control over the final outcome of the work may cause students anxiety. To better recognise individual contributions, you might choose to conclude a group-work project with an individual assessment, or use intra-group peer assessments (Maijer, 2010). 
• Any unfamiliar assessment can be stressful for students, and impact attainment. Guidance and support improve the student experience (Natoli et al., 2014): 
  • Sharing guidance: instructions and marking criteria, tips, and sample papers can be shared on Moodle. 
  • Check-in points: scheduled milestone meetings and seminars can be used for discussing or presenting work in progress. 
  • Tutor feedback: written or in-person formative feedback from the tutor 

For all these challenges, ensure that you communicate the rationale for using group work to students, along with the intended learning outcomes and how they will be assessed. 

Ensure students understand whether they are assessed on the ‘product’, the ‘process’ (use of group-work skills), or both. 

Tutor allocation of students to groups is advisable: 

• prevents established friendship groups from working together 
• prevents self-selection into homogeneous groups, which can outperform heterogeneous groups if the group task takes less than four months
• may be perceived by students as more fair

Teachers can diversify groups in terms of gender, background, personality and ability.  

Students benefit from guidance on collaborating and organising themselves. You could require groups to agree ground-rules, write a group contact, or assign roles. Documents such as draft plans, meeting notes or individual journals can be assessed. 

Both fair contribution, and student perception of it, can be a problem (McKay & Sridharan, 2023). Develop a robust and accountable process and ensure students understand it (Rasooli et al., 2024). This could include: 

• Requiring a group agreement on roles, contributions and communications 
• Self-reflection activities within the group work process and/or output 
• Peer rating/evaluation of members within a group 
• Academic conduct declaration 

You will need a resit format which allows students to demonstrate their attainment of the learning outcomes. 

Some forms of misconduct (such as plagiarism) are ideally reduced by self-policing within a group. 

If there are individual components to the assessment, you should communicate and check when collaboration is required and when it is not permitted. 
 

Generative AI could be used to create parts of any group-work assessment. Ensure students are aware of when Generative AI is permitted and useful, and when it cannot be used. You could help to ensure students are meeting the learning outcomes by: carrying out some work towards the assessment during contact time, with peer and academic discussion; including a question and answer session in  the activity; requiring a rationale or reflective piece describing the process of creating the output; focusing marking criteria on higher levels of critique and analysis. 

Materials from LSE100, the flagship interdisciplinary course for all undergraduate students.

• Group project participation policy
• Group project team charter template, to establish ground rules for team meetings, collaboration, and expectations.
• This page of the LSE100 Moodle offers advice to students about establishing a strong basis for collaboration (under the  ‘Academic Techniques’ dropdown). This page is used in conjunction with the team charter activity.

Meijer, H., Hoekstra, R., Brouwer, J., & Strijbos, J. (2020) Unfolding collaborative learning assessment literacy: a reflection on current assessment methods in higher education. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 45(8), 1222-1240. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2020.1729696  

McKay, J., & Sridharan, B. (2023). Student perceptions of collaborative group work (CGW) in higher education. Studies in Higher Education, 49(2), 221–234. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2023.2227677  

Natoli, R., Jackling, B., & Seelanatha, L. (2014). The impact of instructor’s group management strategies on students’ attitudes to group work and generic skill development. Pedagogies: An International Journal, 9(2), 116–132. https://doi.org/10.1080/1554480X.2014.912519  

Rasooli, A., Turner, J., Varga-Atkins, T., Pitt, E., Asgari, S., & Moindrot, W. (2024). Students’ perceptions of fairness in groupwork assessment: validity evidence for peer assessment fairness instrument. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 50(1), 111–126. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2024.2354510  

Sutton, A., & Taylor, D. (2010). Confusion about collusion: working together and academic integrity. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 36(7), 831–841. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2010.488797 

Telling, K. (2024). Why do students resist assessment by group-work? Hearing critique in the complaint. European Educational Research Journal, 23(5), 745-763. https://doi.org/10.1177/14749041241249223