Resources

Mhairi McAlpine, Computer Assisted Assessment Team, Scottish Qualifications Authority

Introduction

Team-working is a common experience in both adult working environments and in learning environments. However, within the key transition periods of upper secondary and further education, groupwork tends to be less common. One of the main reasons for this is the difficulty of awarding individual qualifications on the basis of group work. As students get closer to employment though, the need for them to learn the essentials of teamwork continues to grow.

Difficulties in assessing groupwork have contributed to an assessment culture which dismisses groupwork as a supplementary activity, rather than a core learning experience to be valued. This issue has been recognised for many years, and there has been a trend to attempt to develop competences where the student is required to demonstrate good team-working attributes which can be observed by others, or in the production of material which demonstrates that they understand the principles of good teamwork. Unfortunately many of these assessments are artificial, and have not managed to assess how effectively learners have collaborated to boost the performance of the overall team. Until now, this has been very difficult to do, and impossible in a controlled situation such as a public examination.

What is a wiki?

Wikis are part of an emerging form of technology called 'social software' which attempts to replicate social structures in an online context. A wiki is an editable web document which can track edits, comments made and discussion behind the scenes. The time and date of edits as well as who made the edit are logged. As collaborative tools with built-in tracking, wikis can overcome a number of problems that have been identified with assessing groupwork.

Using a wiki to produce a collaborative project document allows us to observe:

• who did the majority of the work
• who provided the main ideas behind the document
• who evaluated the document as it went along
• who was unhelpful or obstructive
• who acted as peacemaker and ensured that people were kept on task
• the existence of conflict among participants about the direction of the document
• the methods of conflict resolution that were employed.

These are all elements of the essential evidence needed to properly assess people's contributions to a piece of collaborative work, and also to assess their teamwork skills in achieving it.

How can a wiki address the difficulties of assessing groupwork?

A commonly identified problem within groupwork is that group members may 'freeload' - taking credit for the group's achievement while they themselves contribute little to it. Another identified issue in groupwork is the danger that a subgroup of confident and well-integrated members may take over a project, either deliberately or by default.

The wiki environment encourages cooperation between the team members, because everyone can see the joint effort - both in terms of products and also in terms of what each of the members is contributing. This makes it harder for people either to 'freeload' or to take over. Another advantage of the software is that it provides an explicit discussion space for differences of opinion to be aired, recorded and resolved. The 'history' page can be used to explore the contribution of each group member to the overall outcome, while the 'discussion' page can shed light on any controversies or differences that the group members had during the development of the project.

Often when learners attempt school-based qualifications, they are quite self-conscious about discussing their work, the opinions of their teachers and those of their classmates. With a wiki, learners are provided with feedback that is relatively quick, but also subtle - if someone feels that a positive contribution has been made, it will be built on; if it was not so helpful, it will eventually be edited out as others improve and develop the document.

Most examples of groupwork involve tasks which require participants to collaborate effectively, however groupwork submitted for assessment is frequently a disparate collection of artefacts created by different people and put together. In a wiki, the software is set up to encourage learners to work together and to produce an integrated and interdependent piece of work. Thus the environment itself encourages the good practice that educators are trying to develop in learners.

Another major issue in assessing groupwork is the difficulty in determining the contributions of individuals. The normal way of dealing with this issue is for group members to label the artefacts which they produced, although this is unlikely to promote an integrated, collaborative product. In a wiki however, this need to explicitly label and claim is sidestepped by the automatic logging inherent in the system. 'Ownership' labelling is done automatically and unobtrusively and encourages people to shape and change others' work, while providing an accurate picture of the roles that people have played in shaping the final document. As people are encouraged to shape and edit each other's work, the final product becomes more fluid and retains community rather than individual ownership.

Conclusion

The Scottish Qualifications Authority intends to pilot the use of social software in Project Based National Courses which require evidence of participation in a group-based project. Together with a blog to allow candidates to report and reflect on their learning, groups will be given a wiki as a presentation and working environment for the evidence generated. The SQA hopes that this will provide additional evidence of ownership in order to grade candidates' work more reliably through the provision of greater assessment information.

The SQA believes that using a wiki in this way will overcome many of the problems which have traditionally prevented groupwork from being used in assessment, and is excited by the possibilities that this opens up to encourage collaborative working and explore new assessment paradigms - seeking to expand validity while retaining the reliability of more traditional assessment forms.