The first of what promises to be a semester-long series on granular-level changes to my globalization course, in which students will be partnering with a local non-profit organization:
Historically my students have been reluctant to evaluate their performance in relation to that of their peers, whether via Monopoly money, rubrics, or anonymous online rank-order surveys. Given that team-based projects account for twenty to twenty-five percent of the final grade in several of my courses, I do think it’s important to ensure some degree of individual accountability in any formally-assessed collaboration between students. No one likes being forced to work with free riders, especially in a course like this one, where students will be conducting research outside of scheduled class time by gathering information from (gasp!) members of the local community. As I have explained to students before — without much success — I can’t be aware of how hard or how well every single one of them has worked with their teammates on a group project, because I’m not always present when the work happens.
So, I racked my brain for a new method of peer evaluation, and came up with the Project Contribution Award:
Please select four people from class, other than yourself, whom you think each deserves 40 points for their outstanding contributions to the project. I will tally the results and the individuals with the most votes will win the award.
Students will submit their choices via an ungraded survey on the Canvas LMS.
The class has only twenty students, so the Project Contribution Award translates into one-fifth of them winning an additional 40 points in a course with a 1,200 point grading scale, a three percent bonus for being perceived by classmates as having performed well on the project. Although I will be dividing students into teams that will take on different responsibilities, the quality of the final product for the community partner will be dependent in some fashion on everyone’s contribution. So I’m hoping that the one in five possibility of earning the award is a sufficient incentive. If not, I can increase the weight of the award in future semesters, or assign one award to each team instead of having multiple awards for the whole class.
A mechanical note: constructing this kind of survey on Canvas requires repeatedly copying and pasting the names of all the students on the class roster. In my case, the survey has four multiple choice questions, each with the same set of twenty names, so the process only took a few minutes. But the inability to generate multiple iterations of a survey or quiz question with a “copy” command probably reduces the utility of Canvas’s quiz feature for courses with large enrollments. No one wants to paste each student’s name over and over again for a 200-student class. In this scenario, I would probably use Google Forms, which does allow the copying of questions. However, I would not be able to just send a link to the survey to students, because responses would be anonymous (allowing students to vote for themselves). Everyone in the class would need Gmail accounts. If your university uses Gmail as its email client, that’s great, but if not, this option requires some extra work on the instructor’s part getting students to create Google accounts with easily-identifiable usernames.
Links to all posts in this series: