Team Projects

In my experiences, team projects are a love/hate relationship for students.  Students view these team projects as something different, a way to socialize with classmates, and potentially less work than individual projects.  However, students are often not satisfied with the execution of the project.  Project work is not always distributed evenly across the project team and team members can perform at different levels and have varying degrees of motivation or definitions of success.  These experiences are similar for both undergraduate and graduate students.

While it would be easy to just give up and not use team projects in my classes, there is value in helping the students become more effective working in teams.  While the project teams may not always be successful in the classroom, their lessons from the team project experiences will help the students prepare for working in project teams in the workplace.  For this reason, I plan to continue to use team projects.  However, proper assessment must be adopted in order to increase the student learning from the team experiences and to apply equitable scoring for contributions to the team effort.

I discussed my dilemma with a colleague in the management department earlier this week and we developed an approach to help students reflect on their contributions to the project and to offer a score more indicative of their contribution to the team's deliverables.  In this approach, the teams will earn the same score for the project deliverables but receive separate scores for their contributions to the project.  The score for the individual contributions will be established by the team itself using criteria determined by and agreed upon by the entire class.  The team will be given a total number of points they are to distribute for themselves and they discuss and provide rational why each member should receive the determined point allotment.  The allotted points are added to the deliverable score for each student's project score.

I plan to try this approach to team projects in my undergraduate database modeling course in the Fall semester.  I expect it may require further refinements but I hope to find some level success with this new method of evaluating team projects.