When students complete work in teams, it is recommended that you assess the teamwork component of the project along with the final output. You might even consider adding teamwork as a learning objective to help emphasize to students that the goal is to work together as a group, not just create a great final product. This can help encourage all members of the team to contribute and provide an opportunity for you to understand how well the team component of the project is functioning.
When to Evaluate Teamwork
For short projects, an evaluation completed when the work is turned in will likely be sufficient. However, for projects that comprise a significant proportion of the final grade or teams that work together throughout the semester, it is useful to assess teamwork at multiple points in time. For example, for a full semester project you might conduct a formal team assessment when students turn in the first major deliverable, at the midpoint of the project, and when they turn in the final product. As noted throughout this guide, knowing how to effectively work in teams isn’t always intuitive and many students will struggle. Conducting a teamwork assessment throughout the project can help you notice problem teams early on to help get them on track for success.
How to Evaluate Teamwork
A lot of the work completed by teams is likely to happen outside of class, which can make it challenging to observe as an instructor. Having all students complete a teamwork reflection rubric will likely give you the best picture of team functioning. The reflection should be detailed and ask each student to individually rate the contributions of each member of the team, including themselves. This resource has four different examples of team evaluation rubrics.
While these ratings won’t always be completely accurate (for example, it is possible for friends to rate one another highly even if one of them isn’t contributing much to the project), in many cases you will notice specific patterns if a team isn’t working well. For example:
- A student rates themselves highly while the rest of the team rates them low. This could indicate that either the student isn’t contributing much or that they’ve taken over the project and are steamrolling the rest of the team.
- Multiple groups emerge within the team where, within a subgroup, everyone is rated highly but everyone outside the subgroup is rated low. This can indicate that there’s strong disagreement with how to move forward with the project or that personalities within the group are clashing and frustrations are running high.
- A student doesn’t complete the assessment and everyone rates them low. This likely indicates that the student hasn’t been contributing to the project at all.
When this assessment is conducted mid-project, it is recommended that you have follow up meetings with each team – even the ones that seem to be doing well. This allows you to ask follow up questions to verify the claims being made and also provide guidance to teams that seem to be struggling. In these meetings, we recommend thinking of yourself as a coach – how do you provide the guidance necessary to ensure the team is as successful as it possibly can be while allowing autonomy of the group? If you had them create a team charter or assign roles early on, it can be useful to draw on those documents to ensure that everyone is following through with their assigned pieces and acting as a productive member of the team. If the team assessment suggests a lot of discord within a team or specific members that are potentially problematic, it may be more useful to meet individually with those students before talking to the team as a whole. See the ‘Supporting Struggling Teams’ section below for more ideas on working through these situations.
Additional Evaluation Tools
Self and peer evaluation is the most common way to assess teamwork, but there are additional metrics that may help gain a more comprehensive picture of how teams are functioning:
Detailed meeting minutes. If your teams will be doing significant work together outside class time, you might ask them to turn in detailed meeting minutes that include the date and time of each meeting, names of everyone in attendance, what was discussed during the meeting, and a list of action items that were assigned to each team member. This both teaches them important team meeting facilitation skills that they’ll use often in life and allows you to know who was responsible for which aspects of the project. Conducting good meetings is a skill that needs to be learned, so it may be useful to provide a template to ensure that teams provide all information that you’re expecting. This will likely produce minutes that are more useful to the students as well.
Meeting Recordings. If students are meeting virtually, you might ask them to record and submit some or all of their meetings. As an instructor, you won’t want to watch all of these recordings, but if you suspect that particular students may not be adequately participating, you can use those recordings to verify who attended meetings and how much each person contributed and volunteered to work on parts of the project.
Teamwork Reflections. At the end of the project, having students submit a written or recorded reflection about the teamwork process, including what they felt their strengths and weaknesses are, can help students connect this experience to their future careers (as well as any group projects they might encounter as a student). These reflections can also help you notice ways to enhance the team aspect of the project in the future.
Should Teamwork Impact Grades?
Assigning a small number of points for completing the peer evaluation process is often necessary to ensure that all students complete the rubrics. A more challenging question is whether the results of the peer evaluation should be used as part of the grading process. On one hand, having a small portion of the final project grade come from teamwork can help incentivize all students to work on the project instead of engaging in social loafing. On the other hand, some instructors use the process as entirely formative, designed to give all teams the best chance of success, but then assign each student within the team the same grade. This is often done to provide a more real-world experience where all members of a team are judged by a final project rather than their individual contributions.
If you do incorporate teamwork into student grades, it is important to clarify exactly how the rubrics that students fill out will be impact grades. We also recommend having a discussion with students about why teamwork is so important that you incorporated it into project grading.