Rewarding Shared Experience: Assessing Individual Contributions to Team-Based Work.

Continuing education students are usually mature students who have a wealth of experience from which their peers and the lecturer could profit. An effective teaching method with such students is the use of cooperative work assignments, but a problem that prevents lecturers from using this method is the difficulty of assigning grades to individual students for their collaborative group work. This paper describes an effective assessment procedure that puts individual accountability into the assessment of cooperative assignments so that students are fairly rewarded for sharing their experience. The technique, which involves peer evaluations of each member's contributions to the work, was tested with 57 undergraduate and graduate students in 8 cooperative groups. Students were asked to evaluate the contributions of each member of the group to the project, but the project grade was assessed without regard to these ratings. The variation in the marks received by a group member were used as a measure of the reliability of the member's grade, and the reasons given for each of the peer evaluations served as indications of the construct validity of the group member's mark. The peer assessments were used in combination with the group mark to award a grade to each participant. Results from the study support the use of the technique in assessing the contributions of each group member. (Contains 2 tables and 18 references.) (SLD)