Pedagogical Pattern #41
Assigning and Grading (short) Team Projects Pattern

(Version 1.0)
Jeanine Meyer
Pace University
One Pace Plaza
New York, NY 10038 USA
meyer@pace.edu

The requirement for students to work in teams for short, medium or long duration projects brings up many issues of teaching and learning. I hope others will contribute patterns on this topic. This pattern touches on a small number of techniques that I have used.

Name:

Assigning and grading (short) team projects (duration for one class session to 2-3 weeks)

Intent:

Team work is now recognized as something that should and can be part of the school experience since team work will be commonplace in most students’ careers. Team work In addition, team work can deepen the learning of subject matter because the projects can be more substantial. This may be especially significant in object-oriented design work though I suspect it applies to many disciplines as well.

Motivation:

Two related issues that emerge often with teamwork are how to assign the teams and how to give grades. In my classes, students tend to stick with people they know, which, for the most part, would be people exactly like themselves in terms of gender, age, ethnic background. I feel it valuable to mix the students up. I also seek to have mixed teams with respect to skills, both ‘level’ and type.
My approach to the team projects is to give the project one grade and that would apply to all team members. To me, this most resembles the real-world model. It may be true that students contribute differently, but that also is the real-world.
(Note: I have heard about what seem to be wonderful approaches for long term projects when there is a project to ‘fire’ a member.)

Applicability:

These approaches apply to projects given for 1 or 2 week time periods, or even a project that consumes a single class time.
Recently because I forgot the dice, was to have someone flip a coin and produce a numbeunting off--this certainly separates groups sitting together or a very non-random approach in which I strive for balance across several attributes: my assessment of their standing in class (this is usually reduced to my taking the best students and the worst students and doling them out one to a group), gender, ethnic origin, age (again, I categorize students as being college age and older and make sure these are mixed).
In longer projects, I may ask the teams to designate roles for each person. This would include giving a presentation in class.
In shorter projects, I tell the teams to divide up the tasks any way that works for them, but that everyone must understand everything. I roll dice to determine who speaks for the class presentation on presentation day. In order for anyone to do this, the students generally spend time preparing props and charts. Everyone gets the same grade!

Consequences:

Students take responsibility for the inter-personal issues and project management issues. Students learn from each other. There is also the phenomenon that individual students may demonstrate unexpected talents.

Implementation:

The class work sessions require me to do the group assignments on the spot so counting off or names out of a hat or using their ID numbers or e-mail numbers are best. For the non-random, "balancing" situation, I work on the assignments before class. I use rubrics for projects.
Throwing dice to determine who presents is something students enjoy. An alternative tactic, which I used recently because I forgot the dice, was to have someone flip a coin and produce a number in binary. This was valuable as a review of binary numbers.

Example Instances:

Group project to produce Web pages as part of introductory computer information systems class; group programming project; group data base design project; etc.

Related Patterns:

Anything to do with team projects?

Home Project
Leaders 		Pedagogical Pattern
Format 		Evolution of a
pedagogical pattern 		Sample
Patterns 		Publications
Subject
Index 		Learning Obj.
Index 		Teaching/Learning
Element Index 		Alphabetical
Index 		Author(s)
Index 		Contact
Us
Previous pattern Search This Site Next pattern