Finding solutions to group tyranny
I was scanning civil society stuff and stumbled upon a link to Paul Resnick, Mark Ackerman and Cory Knobel's workshop wiki at University of Michigan for a workshop on content management systems. (Drupal, it appears, int this case.)
I was interested because I'm working on a project that is adopting Drupal, but what intrigued me was the end of the page, where they talk about how this will be done in groups. Now group work often creates a grading conundrum in education settings. How do you value both the collaborative work and the individual contributions? I thought they had an interesting approach:
SI 631 PEP WorkshopGrading
Tags: group, individual, drupal
All of the deliverables will be graded: Deliverables 1-5 will count 10% each. Deliverable 6 will be 30% of the grade. Deliverable 7 will be 20% of the grade. Your team as a whole will receive a grade on each of these deliverables. Team members will also be asked to evaluate each other's performance, which may lead to raising or lowering of grades for individual team members.
posted by Nancy White at 12:34 PM
2 Comments:
Hello, Nancy,
RE groups in education: this analogy doesn't hold all the way through, but group work can be compared to the prisoners dilemma -- if people trust their groupmates and act accordingly, things work out pretty well.
The piece I found interesting on the course description was the final line: "Team members will also be asked to evaluate each other's performance, which may lead to raising or lowering of grades for individual team members."
Cheers,
Bill
Actually, what we're doing in the class is based on a technique that Mark employed in classes at UC-Irvine.
The last line isn't quite accurate. The students will be evaluating each other; however, the evaluations can only lower their grades...not raise them. This removes the incentive of attempting to boost one's own grade by accusing others (i.e., "I did more work than X, so I should get a better grade.") Apparently, Mark found that by removing the possibility of raising one's own grade through PD-style final round defection, the incentive structure shifted toward students being more honest and objective about their teammates' contributions.
It's a first run course, so we're all interested to see how this goes.
-Cory
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