In previous posts, I’ve discussed how collaborative assignments pose a challenge for valid assessment because the resulting product typically reflects pooled ability and effort (for a good review, see Webb et al. 1998). One way instructors have attempted to overcome…

A challenge of psychological research is that we are often trying to measure things that don’t have physical form, such as intelligence or anxiety. These abstract constructs are meaningful and useful variables, but you can’t measure out 10 grams of…

One of the hallmarks of many group projects is the incorporation of peer assessment into the project grade. This strategy is often used to try to reduce the potential for inequity when individual members of groups share a common grade….

One of the challenges an instructor faces when developing any collaborative project is how to assess learning. When multiple students work together to create some product, it’s not necessarily the case that the final product reflects the learning of all…

Take six people and give them all a list of words to commit to memory individually. Next, have three of those people work as a group to recall as many words as they can. Have the other three people try…

Collaborative testing (aka team-based testing) is a collaborative learning technique that has received a fair amount of attention from researchers (LoGiudice, Pachai, and Kim 2015). It is a practice that typically involves students taking a test individually and then taking…

In previous posts (here and here), I’ve been writing about the different ways that groups can be created for class projects, and whether the method of group assignment has an impact on learning. In this post, I want to focus on one…

As a warning, I’m going to talk about methods again for part of this post because I can’t seem to help myself, but I will actually make a recommendation by the end, so there is a payoff if you bear…

With any group assignment, there are a number of decisions that need to be made before introducing the assignment to students. Some of those decisions have to do with features of the assignment (e.g., what will you assess and when…

Are group assignments effective pedagogy or a waste of time? This is the question asked by researcher Michael Thom (2020) in his recent paper examining the scholarship on collaborative pedagogy. To be clear, I’m being literal here. The title of…