Equity Issues in Collaborative Group Assessment: Group Composition and Performance

Webb, Noreen M.; Nemer, Kariane Mari; Chizhik, Alexander W.; Sugrue, Brenda

doi:10.2307/1163461

Cited by 44 publications

(67 citation statements)

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“…The work of Webb et al [24] is closely related to our work. They gathered a wide sample to study group composition based on grouping different personal ability levels: below-average students, above-average students, and a mix of below and above-average students.…”

Section: Random Assignmentsupporting

confidence: 59%

A Comparative Study of Two Automated Workgroup Composition Strategies

Calafate¹,

Mart́ınez²,

Arlandis³

2016

INTED2016 Proceedings

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Nowadays, the professional environment of leading companies requires multidisciplinary teams to be created, including both internal and external experts, to adequately face the challenges of a fast-evolving and complex market. For newcomers, this situation can be difficult to handle if no previous experiences allowed preparing them for those situations. This is where college education finds its place, and in fact the curricula of different university careers are being updated to include more transversal competences like leadership and cooperation skills within groups. However, such efforts still remain at an amateur level in most cases due to lack of specific expertise by the majority of instructors, due to limitations in terms of creating actual multidisciplinary groups, and due to the little resources available to maximize the benefits of such experiences. Students also show little involvement in this issue, typically opting for approaches that minimize their efforts. Thus, simple and yet effective strategies that can be helpful for instructors to make a meaningful change to the current status quo are necessary. To address this need, in this paper we present the results of a 2-year study where students were forced to team up with other partners based on the results of a computer networking skills-ranking exam. In the first experiment, groups where formed by students achieving a similar performance (homogeneous), while in the second experiment groups were formed so that the average score of group members was the same (mostly heterogeneous). Through detailed survey results taken by students at the end of both courses, we find that, compared to the alternative strategy promoting group heterogeneity, having partners with similar skills does not help at improving the coordination between group members, nor students' perception about the usefulness of the experience towards future jobs. In fact, their rating of the overall experience was mostly the same, and, to our surprise, the partner expertise on the course topics was not a motivating factor, being that students' complaints in both cases were about not being able to pick their partners. Thus, we consider that a simple strategy to define groups (e.g. randomly) suffices, but it should be adopted on all courses since the first year of the degree.

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Section: Random Assignmentsupporting

confidence: 59%

A Comparative Study of Two Automated Workgroup Composition Strategies

Calafate¹,

Mart́ınez²,

Arlandis³

2016

INTED2016 Proceedings

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“…High-ability students learned equally well in either grouping arrangement. Similarly, in a study of 21 eighth-grade science classrooms, Webb, Nemer, Chizhik, and Sugrue (1998) found that low-ability students showed higher achievement when they worked with higher-achieving students, whereas high-ability students were not disadvantaged by working in mixed-ability groups. Although these findings need further inves-tigation, it is clear that low-ability children learn best in mixed-ability groups.…”

Section: Group Compositionmentioning

confidence: 92%

Ten Australian Elementary Teachers' Discourse and Reported Pedagogical Practices during Cooperative Learning

Gillies¹,

Boyle²

2006

The Elementary School Journal

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“…They perform better when working with above-average students. The reverse, however, does not follow: high achievers profit the most from working with other high achievers (Webb et al, 1998) …”

Section: Co-operative Learningmentioning

confidence: 98%

“…Cohen & Lotan, 1995;Cohen, Lotan & Catanzarite, 1990) and Webb (e.g. Webb, 1991;Webb, Nemer & Chizhik, 1998) figure prominently. The starting point is the finding that students do not profit equally from co-operative learning, because of differences in background.…”

Section: Co-operative Learningmentioning

confidence: 99%

Making Sense Through Participation

2004

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Abstract. In this chapter we discuss the issue of social differences in relation to learning. In theories on co-operative learning or collaborative learning social differences are treated as characteristics of individual learners. The focus on learning as a social process is primarily elaborated in terms of interaction between pupils and the combined construction of knowledge. Sociocultural theory (Vygotsky, Lave & Wenger), however, understands 'social' not only in terms of knowledge/meaning being constructed in interaction with others, but also in terms of the cultural practices/activities informing these interaction processes. Learning can be understood as increasing participating in communities of practice. As social differences are an intrinsic part of the culture in which students are learning to participate, these are also an inherent aspect of learning processes in schools. Students learn to participate in practices in different ways, depending on their social position, and thus develop distinguished cultural identities. In this chapter we elaborate on this tenet, using examples from various empirical research projects on learning in secondary education. We not only show how social differences in the cultural practices that underpin learning influence what is learned by whom, but also explore the consequences of this perspective for the pedagogical space of the school.. INTRODUCTIONStudents have been working in groups on an assignment in a technology lesson. They were supposed to make a bridge construction. Afterwards the fourteen year old students comment on the process:Rose: 'Well, the group that did best, were really clever at it. They had chosen their materials really well, their bridge could carry 36 kilos, and that's quite a lot. They did have two girls in that group but they didn't do as much as the boys. The boys were much quicker in seeing what to do. They did it just like that, don't ask me how, but their bridge could really carry a lot, quite smart of them, actually. I couldn't do it.'Dennis: 'The girls weren't interested at all when we started, but now some are beginning to get interested. They like it when you help them. There are things that they don't know, that you have to explain to them. But the simple things, when they realise that it can be fun, then they find it nice. They are rummaging a bit together, and when it all works more or less, they find it fun. Now they start to apply things that they learned last year, but at the time they didn't want to participate … thought they couldn't do it, and the teacher was busy helping the girls all the time.'More and more educational theories emphasise that learning is not an individual but a social process, and that explicitly making use of the social dimension of learning processes, for instance by introducing group work, fosters learning (Van der Linden, Erkens, Schmidt & Renshaw, 2000). In the learning situations sketched above, plenty of social processes are going on: intended and unintended processes, processes that foster learning and pro...

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Equity Issues in Collaborative Group Assessment: Group Composition and Performance

Cited by 44 publications

References 0 publications

A Comparative Study of Two Automated Workgroup Composition Strategies

A Comparative Study of Two Automated Workgroup Composition Strategies

Ten Australian Elementary Teachers' Discourse and Reported Pedagogical Practices during Cooperative Learning

Making Sense Through Participation

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