Collaborative Projects

Don’t assume that that students will know how to work together. Providing cohort-wide guidance on team working, etiquette, and inclusion will help to establish expectations. In early stages, allow time for students to learn these skills and provide opportunities for students to reflect on how they can improve their group’s effectiveness. You can also support students to reflect on their own strengths within a team context.

As team projects develop across your programme you may wish to include mechanisms to ensure that students gain a variety of experiences of different roles.

Support students to see diversity as a positive attribute of team working. Student teams will reflect our diverse student population encompassing differences in culture, ethnicity, gender, socio-economic background and academic working level. This variety enhances creativity and innovation, encouraging students to challenge assumptions and consider alternative viewpoints. It also mirrors the realities of modern workplaces, better preparing students for collaborative careers in global industries.

Diverse groups promote the development of key interpersonal and intercultural skills. Students learn to communicate effectively across differences, negotiate meaning, and build mutual respect -- skills that employers increasingly value. From an academic standpoint, diversity can lead to richer discussions, more robust critical thinking, and improved learning outcomes. 

Design interesting and challenging exercises that groups can complete in the time allowed and with the resources available.

Give clear instructions at the beginning of the exercise and monitor progress. Encourage groups to clarify anything that they don't understand. Explain how you'll assess the project and what outputs students need to produce.

Groups function most effectively when they have milestones to work towards. You can build these into your assessment design or groups can negotiate them by themselves.

Ask groups to keep records of meetings so that all members have a common understanding of tasks in progress, deadlines and responsibilities. When monitoring progress, encourage groups to be sympathetic to each other's circumstances. Offering each other support during the task may be the more effective than getting to a deadline only to find that one member has struggled to complete their assigned work.

Personality clashes or domineering members can create personal issues within groups. Encourage groups to give all members opportunities to speak at team meetings. Remind them that any group project will require negotiation and compromise.

Unequal contribution has been identified by many as a common issue in groupwork, often this is described as 'freeloading'. However, some group members may be naturally quieter than others. Encourage groups to promote contribution by all members to group discussions and meetings. Each member should be given the opportunity to contribute to discussion and give opinion.  Peer assessment and individually assessed components can support you to identify unequal contributions.

When you explicitly champion diversity in group work, you create a more inclusive environment where students can participate according to their strengths. You may need to provide simple modifications for individual students or, where these aren't appropriate, alternative assessments. See: Inclusive Assessment: Groupwork

For support and advice with students who have a Student Support Plan (SSP) affecting their ability to contribute to group work,  contact Student Health and Wellbeing

You can opt to assess the output the group produces (product), the teamworking and problem solving involved during the group working (process), or a combination of these. Your intended learning outcomes should guide your approach, along with the relevance of skill development and reflection for your students at their stage of learning.

• Assessing the product only: this approach disadvantages groups that work and learn well together but fail to produce the desired output; similarly a group could produce a strong output without effective teamwork
• Assessing the process only: this can encourage greater creativity and reward groups that develop strengths in negotiation and problem solving, but requires careful thought on how students should collate and reflect on their working.
• Assessing a combination of product and process gives the potential for teams to be rewarded for their collaboration and the quality of their output.

Students often perceive group assessment as unfair (Sambell et al., 1997), particularly when non-contributing members receive the same marks as engaged participants. To address this concern, design assessments that enable students to clearly identify individual contributions within their projects.

One effective approach combines group assessments with individual summative components—such as reflective essays or examinations that contribute a percentage of the module credit. These individual elements can either relate directly to the group task or assess broader learning outcomes independently.

While you might attempt to gauge individual contributions through observations, meeting records, or discrete task elements, group members themselves provide the most authentic evaluation. As Healey (2024) notes, students are uniquely positioned to assess their group's effectiveness and each member's contribution level—they alone have complete insight into the group's internal dynamics.

You can use peer assessment to evaluate contributions to group work, with results informing individual marks:

• The peer assessment generates individual adjustment factors, which are then used to multiply the group mark. High performing group members receive scores higher than the group mark, those who made limited contributions will receive less than the group mark.  
• The peer assessment is used to generate a small range of marks added to the group mark.   

While students can negotiate peer assessment (eg splitting 100 marks between themselves), you will more commonly run this as an anonymous process using submitted forms or a tool like Buddycheck tool in Canvas. 

Cautions

• Student evaluation of their peers could be open to biases and subjectivity. You need to carefully moderate and oversee the allocation of final marks.
• Carefully consider the weighting you attach to peer assessment - if this is too high it may foster competition and be counterproductive. 

See Guidance on Group Work with Peer Assessment for further details.