Group allocation based on peer feedback

Abstract

The extraction of individual marks from a group submission is one approach to address the problem of students who don't contribute adequately to group work. This is a highly active research area. An alternative is proposed in this paper: alter the method by which groups are allocated for assessed coursework in tertiary education. The proposed two-step method involves (i) soliciting feedback from the students on the effort invested by their classmates in preliminary assignments and (ii) using these data to allocate groups for a subsequent larger assignment. Students who invest a lot of effort in the preliminary assignments are grouped with similarly motivated students, reducing their dissatisfaction, while students who formerly acted as ‘freeloaders’ are now obliged to engage with the larger assignment and thereby achieve the desired learning outcomes. This paper describes a trial of this group allocation approach for an undergraduate engineering design course of 111 students.