Our blog assignment for this week asks some very interesting questions along the lines of how we should assess participation in a collaborative learning community.
My initial response to the question is along the lines of what Siemens (n.d.) argues, that participation implies effort and time involved in an activity, and that measures of participation such as time on task, frequency of posting, etc., can be tracked and assessed easily online more in terms of effort than of quality.
But I think to a degree this misses the point, and I think that a better question to ask is how do we go about assessing the quality of the collaborative input of an individual in a group. We've all been in groups where someone participates too much, dominates the conversation, or whose contributions to a project, if adopted, would actually end up making the project worse.
The reason education falls into the trap of assessing participation in collaborative efforts rather than quality of participation in collaborative efforts lies in the fact that education has a long history of being very good at assessing and measuring individual effort and quality, but largely has no idea how to go about measuring the quality of individual contributions to things like brainstorming sessions, or collaboratively written documents. In essence, I'd argue that vast majority of teachers would be overwhelmed if asked to measure individual contributions in a group.
First of all, it's extremely hard to do. As a Japanese teacher, I'd often ask students to give group performances, and it became clear early on that measuring an individual performance when five students are doing something at the same time was impossible for one person to do. In order to assess it properly, I'd have to record the event, then watch it five times, measuring each individual performance separately. The trickier part would come when one person's performance suffered because another person wasn't up to par. At times, it was like evaluating a wide receiver who caught no passes because his quarterback overthrew him ten times. What do you do then?
The answer to this, though, lies in efforts by education to be more purposeful in identifying the pieces that go into effective groups and then specifically teaching and measuring those skills. It's a tremendously overlooked field of research, with the well known Johnson and Johnson perhaps still at the forefront of this work. XteAchnology has a good article summing up the complexity of their work in dissecting the key elements of effective groups and coming up with ways of purposefully teaching and assessing collaborative skills and efforts. In recent years, more research and resources are available to teachers in the field on cooperative learning. The blog Teacher Reboot Camp, for example, has a great post listing a treasure trove of resources to learn more about cooperative learning.
But even if you teach group skills, the question that often comes up is what to do with the student who doesn't participate. In such cases, I think it's the responsibility of the teacher to get involved and discuss with the student his or her options. From a personal viewpoint, I don't think participation is negotiable, although as a teacher I would often make accommodations and do everything in my power to help the student build the skills to participate effectively and for the group to function well. Palloff & Pratt (2007) provide many examples of steps a teacher can take to monitor and build groups, such as encouraging neither too little or too much participation, etc. The bottom line, however, is that human beings need to function both individually and in groups, and participation in group projects that gets excused isn't doing anyone a favor.
References
Palloff, R. M., & Pratt, K. (2007). Building online learning communities: Effective strategies for the virtual classroom. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Siemens, G. (n.d.). Assessment of collaborative learning [vodcast]. Laureate Education. Retrieved from http://sylvan.live.ecollege.com/ec/crs/default.learn?CourseID=4692780&Survey=1&47=6562140&ClientNodeID=984645&coursenav=1&bhcp=1
Terrell, S. (2010, November 19). Cooperative learning: effective team work! 20+ resources. [Web log post]. Retrieved from http://teacherbootcamp.edublogs.org/2010/11/19/cooperative-learning-effective-team-work-15-resources/
XteAchnology. (n.d.). Johnson and Johnson's thoughts on cooperative learning. Retrieved January 11, 2011, from http://www.teach-nology.com/currenttrends/cooperative_learning/johnson_and_johnson/
Hello Mike, Interesting post. It must be so interesting to teach Japanese. I do think that some teachers to measure collaborative efforts by students. They do so by providing a rubric for its evaluation. I don't think however that cooperative learning a branch of collaborative learning is always used for that purpose. Usually I choose to do a cooperative learning activity over an individual assignment because I want my students to bring their learning to the next level. I want them to either complete a complex task that may require them to recall facts or be more creative. I think by being together their learning experience is enriched and they depend on each other for the completion of the task. If the members are not all participating equally it will be evident in the traditional individual assessment that follows.
ReplyDeleteMike
ReplyDeleteI like the twist that you take in responding to the questions asked concerning this module’s blog. Quality is indeed important in collaboration. Everyone will try to participate in activities, but the quality, most often, is missing.
The history of testing in education centers on individual assessment, so you are right about us, as educators and assessors, not being able to assess collectively.
The days of the self-learning seems to be disappearing as education becomes more interactive. How do you suggest we as educators learn how to assess groups rather than individuals, knowing that we, ourselves, were individually assessed?
Congrats on your Japanese experience. I am sure that it has made you more culturally aware. What a time to make the statement ‘at times, it was like evaluating a wide receiver who caught no passes because his quarterback overthrew him ten times’? Who are you rooting for the, the green giants – the might Jets, from New York (my hometown) or the New England patriots? The big showdown is tomorrow.
Mike: You raise a very important part of the assessment process that is often overlooked; the QUALITY of the assessment. Time and active participation does not mean that this is quality interaction. One effective posting may better reflect quality than a series of regular low level replies. Good discussion.
ReplyDelete@Dr. Powley: Thanks for the comments! Sorry I spaced out on replying to people's posts for this one. I thought they were due today (not yesterday). My bad.
ReplyDelete@Milton: I mentioned this in the discussion forum, but I'm not convinced that the days of individual performance and individual learning are disappearing. I think that the vast majority of what we now call collaborative work is actually people doing individual work and then clumping it all together with other people's work. I don't think that is truly "collaborative." It's just individual work that gets added to a group project.
@Karen: Thanks for your comment. I love group projects, and what I loved most about it was when I had students who would tell me before the project started that they hated group projects, and then tell me at the end of the project that they loved it! That always made me feel good.