Looking at student performance in the 2020-2021 academic year, I see evidence that team research projects due at the end of the semester can’t be scaffolded solely around individually-graded assignments completed throughout the semester. For example, in my Middle East politics course, each student shared four individually-completed assignments with their teammates for use in their team’s historical timeline. In my research methods course, there were ten individual assignments that teammates were supposed to share with each other as drafts of sections of team research reports. While this approach does decrease free riding and encourage collaboration, it apparently does not ensure high quality research in the final product. Four of the five timelines that teams created in the Middle East course lacked mention of significant events. None of the four teams in the research methods course collected information from coffee farmers, processors, or distributors in Central America, despite my instructions to do so, nor did the final reports resemble the industry exemplars I had provided.
It seems that in students’ minds, my formative assessment of their individual work is totally unconnected to the summative assessment of their collaborative work. I probably need to break the team project into discrete, graded chunks, with each chunk layered on top of some of the individual assignments. Teams can use the feedback they receive on each successive chunk of the project to improve the quality of the final product.