Engaging Learners with New Strategies and Tools

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Assessing Collaborative Efforts

Assessments are a topic that has many views in the field of education. The argument for or against standardized testing or the inclusion of performance tasks as a means of assessments as an answer to this debate has not been solved. Now there is an added means of assessment: Collaboration.  Why? Because that is how the working world works. So, as a teacher, how do I plan to  assess collaboration?  In the primary grades assessing collaboration requires training and understanding of both the teacher and students. My first experience with collaboration was literature circles. In these groups, students have assigned task. Each task contributes to the outcome of the circles product.  In science, primary teachers use a similar setup however the names of the task are different, utilizing scientific language.  By utilizing these groups teachers provide the students with a participation card. These cards have the task names and students add the names of their teammates under each task. At the end, of the collaboration either each interaction or at the end students use a color code (green: good participation, Yellow: Ok participation, and Red: did not participate with the group), faces (happy face: good participation, straight face: ok participation, and sad face: did not participate with the group), or lastly written comments (students share how they felt in the group with each person and how it impacted the group). George Siemens (2008) called this model students assess their peers. This model works well in primary grades because students know that the teacher will not be the only means of assessment.

Equitable assessments for learners brings about some difficulty for the instructor. The best means of allowing equity is to provide rubrics for performance tasks. By providing an expectation (a model is useful) for students helps those that aren’t as prepared an understanding of what is being asked of them, and those students that are capable of the completion of the task can look at the highest level on the rubric to see if there is any aspect of the task they can make better.  It also helps to utilize more than one means of assessment, or utilizing the principle of diversity (providing students choices to demonstrate their understanding (Silver, Harvey, Strong, Richard, Perini, Matthew, 200)).

For students that are not accustom to collaboration, the instructor may need to modify the involvement of the student. This modification is not to isolate the student, but have the student become more comfortable with working with others. In the primary grades teachers make these arrangements with students and parents to ensure that the student is not forced into unfamiliar territory which may limit or hinder the learning process for the student. The goal of primary teachers is to have students experience collaboration and become comfortable with working with others before they get into the intermediate, middle, and high school grades, because we have found that it is easier to train a child early. Teachers do this because we know that collaboration will be a requirement later.

Laureate Education, Inc. (Producer) (2008). Principles of Distance Education [DVD]. Assessment of Collaboration. Baltimore: Author

Silver, Harvey, Strong, Richard, Perini, Matthew. (2000). So Each May Learn: Integrating Learning Styles and Multiple Intelligences. Alexandria, VA: ASCD

Storyboard for Gaming Presentation

Storyboard for Gaming Presentation