Customized Assessment Group Initiative: A Complementary Approach to Students' Learning

Abstract

This study, conducted in a US setting, examines the importance of group dynamics that emphasize cooperative team building through the proposed grouping strategy called Customized Assessment Group Initiative (CAGI). CAGI is a student grouping strategy designed to operationalize the mutual accountability concept central to the definition of teams by Katzenbach and Smith [(1993). The wisdom of teams: Creating the high performance. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Press]. Spanning two semesters and using a sample of sophomore students in the Introductory/Principles of Accounting class, I implement CAGI in a five-stage process to show students’ performance differences between the conventional grouping technique and the CAGI grouping strategy, thereby highlighting the potential pedagogical value of CAGI in the classroom. The findings demonstrate that CAGI has the heightened capacity to enhance substantially and improve concretely students’ performances. I strongly believe that CAGI could be promising to accounting and other business school students at a university where emphasis is placed on ‘teamship’ and not just group membership.

Key Words:

• Customized Assessment Group Initiative (CAGI)
• cooperative learning
• teamship

Acknowledgements

The author acknowledges the insightful comments on this paper by the participants at the 2014 AAA conference and those at the Business Innovation Research Center conference, North Dartmouth. The author is also grateful to the Center for Teaching Excellence (CTE) at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, which provided the initial funding for this research. He also thanks his colleagues at the University of Texas – Pan American for their constructive comments. He is especially grateful to the Editor, Alan Sangster, the (anonymous) Associate Editor, and the two anonymous reviewers whose critiques constructively improved this study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Siegel and Sorensen (1994) report that corporate America and most employers prefer potential employees (including accounting and business graduates) with team-building ability to those without this much desirable skill.

2 The Bedford Report is the product of the Bedford Committee commissioned by the American Accounting Association in 1984 to examine the ‘Future Structure, Content and Scope of Accounting Education’ in the USA. For more, see http://aaahq.org/aecc/pdf/history/preface.pdf (retrieved on August 2, 2014).

3 At the prompting of the then Big 8 public accounting firms, the AECC was launched. This commission is supported within the structure of the American Accounting Association and it was expected to actively implement real changes in accounting curricula and education in the USA. For more, see https://aaahq.org/AECC/history/chap2.htm (retrieved on August 2, 2014).

4 While the 1986 Bedford Report and AECC (1990) advice might appear old, their concerns are not. Successive identical commissions and initiatives focusing on accounting education in the USA continue to loudly echo similar concerns (see for example the reports of the Pathways Commission, 2012). In fact, Lawson et al. (2013) in their review of the recommendations of the Joint Curriculum Taskforce on Accounting Education discuss the growing need for team-based learning models. Hence, the contemporary nature of the Bedford Report contextually.

5 A survey reported by Albrecht and Sack (2000) indicates that nearly 75% of accounting professor/educators employ one grouping or team technique or the other in the classrooms.

6 Prior to collecting data for research purposes, CAGI as a student grouping technique was an idea crafted and explored by the author across several semesters of classroom teaching (mainly on a trial-and-error basis). Anecdotal evidence therefrom appears promising. Hence the need to formally test it in a research setting as outlined and reported in the current study.

7 One group informed me that the members went for beer after the semester; two groups threw a party together after the successful semester. Others report some worthy social interactions. In other words, CAGI becomes a catalyst for socialization and networking among the students.

8 In the US lexicon, K–12 refers to the pathway from kindergarten to the final year (i.e. 12th grade) of high/secondary education. It basically describes years of formal education prior to college/university education.

9 Also in the US context, sophomore is generally used to describe students who are in the second year of college/university or high/secondary school education. Freshman, junior, and senior describe students in the first, third, and fourth year education, respectively.

10 Ballantine et al. (2008) describe such students’ study preferences as ‘less dynamic and amenable to change’ (p. 198). I submit that students’ satisfaction at the earlier stage of the process is vitally essential in this context.

11 By design, the two individual assignments in Stage 1 are administered consecutively before Stage 2 assignments. This is designed to allow for some passage of time before Stage 2 assignments are administered.

12 Even when no conflict arises, I still grade individual assignments only for the purpose of providing constructive feedback to the students individually in order to improve subsequent assignments.

13 Students tend to understand the consequences of irreconcilable disagreement and therefore undertake all necessary negotiation tactics to foster compromise. That is a classical understanding of what TEAM (‘Together Everyone Achieves More’) dynamics entail.

14 These qualities include group identification and sense of pride or duty toward their group. He claims that these qualities promote ‘group cohesiveness' and ‘high-effort contributions from group members'.

15 Note that Stages 2 and 4 which are group work (albeit conventional and CAGI, respectively) have more observations than Stages 3 and 5 because two assignments are given to students in the former stages, and one assignment given in the latter stages (for reasons earlier provided).

16 In the additional analysis not reported here, I include such students’ marks. The results remain qualitatively similar and the tenor of the findings remains unchanged.

17 Figure 5a and (5b) show the expected (deviation from) normal plot for Stage 1. Similar plots for Stages 2–5 are generated but suppressed for parsimony since their patterns and trends are substantially identical. 

18 Clinton and Kohlmeyer (2005) precisely find that ‘ … performance did not improve as a result of group learning’ (p. 111). Within the context of exam re-take, Gabbin and Wood (2008) report that cooperative learning strategy ‘does not promote accounting majors academic achievement’ (p. 402).

19 As reported earlier, the two tests of normality, S–W and K–S, produce mixed results. While K–S shows that the data in this stage are normally distributed, S–W indicates otherwise. It is believed that S–W is more appropriate for the sample size of the current study thereby making it the most ‘powerful normality test’ (for more see Razali & Wah, 2011). Efforts are also made to transform the variable, but results remain unchanged. Hence the need to perform and report results from both the parametric and nonparametric tests.

20 Cartledge and Kourea (2008) note the challenges posed by cultural and linguistic diversities when it comes to students learning and academic engagement. The authors argue specifically that ‘culturally responsive effective instruction’ (p. 352) is vital to successful student learning outcomes.

21 In fact, the authors admit that more studies are required to provide necessary fundamental explanations for the causes of such differences.