Towards an operational framework for establishing and assessing collaborative interactions

Abstract

Collaboration skills have been identified as an important educational outcome, not just as a means to enable learning mechanisms to be enacted, but also as a demonstrable skill of interest to assessment practitioners. In recent years, there has been an ambition to develop models of assessment that are underpinned by the collaborative process, and directly assess collaborative abilities of individuals – an ‘assessment imperative’. Defining collaboration, however, has important implications for how it is appropriately measured. In this paper, we present a new framework that educational practitioners (teachers, awarding organisations and test developers) can utilise when attempting to set optimal assessment tasks from which constructs of collaboration can be engendered (and thus observed). This pragmatic framework is presented with reference to three pertinent, interrelated issues in developing assessments that target collaboration: initial construct definition; enabling ‘true’ collaboration formation; and the assessment model for collaboration. This framework is a first attempt at reconciling tensions at the heart of the assessment of collaboration, namely the imperative for assessors to arrive at a judgement on individuals’ collaborative skills, and the related difficulties in optimising group dynamics.

Keywords:

• Collaborative learning
• assessment
• validity
• literature review

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Sylvia Green, Paul Bullen-Smith and Helen Eccles for the insightful discussion on earlier drafts of this article.