Group Process Analysis: Self and Peer Assessment of Working Together in a Group

SUMMARY

Cooperation has been found to confer many benefits in the educational setting. While, in higher education, the small group project may provide an ideal setting for cooperative working, it is often not chosen as a learning strategy because of problems with assessment of individual contributions. The present study describes a small group project in which the process of working together is assessed by the group members themselves, while the product of the exercise is marked in the traditional way by the lecturer. Responsibility for choice of project and format of product was devolved to group members themselves, in order to maximize involvement and learning benefits. Consultation between group members (seven final‐year developmental psychology students) and lecturer took place over the self‐ and peer‐assessment checklist, the final form of which was decided by the student participants. On completion of the exercise, no consistent pattern of over‐ or under‐marking was found when comparing self markers with their peers. However, the only statistically significant difference was one of undermarking on the part of one participant. High levels of agreement between peer markers was found. Rank ordering of group members pointed to differences between task‐oriented and group maintenance behaviour ratings, with the coefficient of concordance for task functions being found to be highly significant, while that for maintenance functions just failed to reach significance. Possible reasons for this difference are discussed and recommendations for the direction of future studies made. It is concluded that self and peer assessment of the process of working together in a group is a simple and effective way of moving towards a solution to the problem of evaluation of group work.