http://www.cdtl.nus.edu.sg/link/jan2000/peer2.htm

Participation & Evaluation in Group Writing Projects

Ms J. E. Lisa Meyer
Centre for English Language Communication

We teachers at NUS are still faced with several questions regarding the use of group writing projects (GWPs). These include: (1) How much do we know about our students’ attitude toward, and behaviour during, a GWP? (2) How can we ensure equal participation and fairly grade the resulting written projects? I hoped to answer these questions through research conducted in 1998/99. Students taking CS2301 (Business and Technical Communication) in the School of Computing completed questionnaires after doing a group report-writing project. Here I will focus on my findings for Question 2.

Encouragement and Evaluation of Participation

Naturally, it is important that all students participate equally in a GWP. Some students would agree with this—one student wrote that, in order to manage the GWP successfully, it was necessary to make sure all group-mates were hardworking, that there were no ‘leeches’. However, in my questionnaire I found that only 30% of the students rated level of participation as an important measurement of their success in the GWP. Therefore, we teachers must shoulder some of the responsibility for encouraging equal participation.

Many teachers feel it is also necessary to evaluate level of participation so as to give fairer grades. But what is the best way to do this? Students find it difficult to point out a group-member’s failure to participate equally, or do satisfactory work. This is one topic they struggle to be straightforward in.

To try to overcome this, I originally used a ‘secret’ peer evaluation of participation. In my follow-up questionnaire, I asked the students what they felt about this method of participation evaluation, about the need for peer evaluation, and about their willingness to do peer evaluation.

Generally, students reported that peer evaluations of participation are not needed. The following response was typical: “I believe at our level, most of us are able to control the group and make sure there are no free-riders. We do not need such a review at all.”

Probably for the same reasons they hesitate to bring up lack of participation with their group members, students are not willing to complete even a ‘secret’ peer evaluation honestly. One student commented, “Some of us may want to avoid ‘unhappiness’ among our peers and give false evaluation just to make the whole group happy.”

Regarding my peer evaluation form, only about 50% of students found it useful or fair. Some students confessed that lack confidence in their ability to give accurate and thus fair peer evaluation. “The problem is how are we going to assess the level of participation? Rather subjective.” One extreme fear was that “this may lead to SABOTAGE on unsuspecting innocents.” It seems students only feel the peer evaluation is fair and useful when “any particular group member is really a hardcore free-rider” or “there are grievances to be voiced”.
Several introspective students gave me suggestions for ways to improve my peer evaluation system. One suggested that I provide a task checklist:

“You can come a list with all the tasks concerning report...and the group is supposed to fill it up (who did which task) and submit to their tutor. I think this is the only way to make them really reflect back and think what they have contributed to the project. Maybe in this way, there won’t be cases of false evaluations.”

A second respondent suggested I leave it up to the students to list the tasks each group member completed. “Let the group list out the parts they are responsible for and the rest of the group members would comment on whether he/she has done enough.”

Last semester, I followed the mature advice of this second respondent and replaced my anonymous peer evaluation with a ‘Record of Participation’ form. Throughout the written project, each group member was supposed to record all the tasks they completed or took part in. It had to be signed by all the group members and then submitted with the report. However, of 60 group reports, the ‘Record of Participation’ forms revealed only two cases of unequal participation. In most cases, even if there was any unequal participation, in the words of one of the course instructors, the students “would never admit to it”.

So, although this ‘Record of Participation’ may not be very helpful in teacher evaluation of group participation, we are at least showing our students that we value equal participation, and that we are giving them the responsibility to ensure it occurs within their groups.