Assessing Collaborative Efforts

I think in order to effectively analyze and respond to the participation in collaborative learning, it is important for the teacher to have both an individual component to the project at hand as well as have a group component.  This way if there is one person who is not pulling his/her own weight, it will be apparent in the grade for that person at the end of the assignment.  It is also important that the teacher meets the students where they are an assess growth.  A good way to do this would be a pretest and a post test of some sort so they can get a good idea of how much growth they had within a course. I truly believe that the point of taking a class is not to meet an objective, but to expand knowledge.  Some students could meet an objective in two weeks, but did they expand knowledge? It’s the teacher’s job to reach out and challenge each student as needed.

Collaboration is very important and I believe that it does bring out the best in us, but instructors need to understand that students at all grade levels k-12 and up have different needs. There are some students that do not like to work with others and do not do well with others.  When I have a student like this, I ask that they give the group a try first. If after a few days into the project or few weeks (depending on length) they still do not like working with the group I do allow them to work on their own.  Since there are jobs out there where they will be working completely alone, that might just be where they are most comfortable. They still are required to meet all deadlines and components of the project as far as the assessment goes.