Is this the best approach? If you have someone in your lecture class that clearly annoys the rest of the class, do you step in? For group work, do you expect students to sort out issues themselves? Does it matter if we are talking about upperclassmen vs. freshmen?
10 comments:
It is sometimes hard to believe, but even freshmen are adults. Sometimes they are very immature adults, but treating them like children is not the answer. If they are disrupting the class the professor owes it to the rest of the students to ask the trouble-makers to leave.
I noticed classes with a larger cohort of mature students naturally work better together. However, the teaching behavior and social skills is a job for school teachers and parents, not college professors. I expect over 18 yr old students to take responsibility for their behavior and realize I am not their high school teacher!
In my experience, the trick to this is to make sure the students all know they will be evaluating each other on their group participation and cooperation. Usually when someone is being disruptive, it's because they're not doing their share of the project. I always hated group projects when I was stuck doing all the work, and I never had anything to show for it. Students need to know they'll be graded independently or there will be some other kind of repercussions. They may be adults, but in my experience, middle-aged adults can be assholes and crybabies, too. It has nothing to do with age, and everything to do with who's got the power in the situation.
p.s. not sure why this post was linked to my last post. Blogger can be random sometimes.
and because on re-reading what I wrote above, let me try again to spell it out more clearly: I'm suggesting you can incorporate their evaluations of each other as part of their grades. So it should look something like this:
Let's say you have 4 students in a group
60% of the grade is from the quality of the group project
10% is from your evaluation of how well they worked together
10% + 10% + 10% is from each of their group-mates
That way, they all have equal footing with each other, and they know that you are keeping an eye on their performance and they can lose points for being jerks.
It's how some of the most successful companies evaluate their employees for promotion and bonuses, so it's not some crazy school thing I just made up out of thin air.
Yeah, my lst post is also linked to this one and so is Prodigal Academic's... Gotta love Blogger.
I really like Ms PhD's suggestion for cross evaluation within the group.
No idea about the post linkage!
In my experience as a student, peer evaluation is usually not very effective. Your fellow students tend to grade you more on whether they "like" you or not. And it seems like everyone assumes they did the most work. Really colleges just need to get rid of group work. I understand it's often there because the instructor is too busy to grade n projects. But I also know industry expects universities to train students to work well in groups. Unfortunately, the group work you do in school is nothing like group work after school.
In my experience peer evaluation was mostly redundant because we simply gave each other 100%!
However, in grad school I did a class where we graded each (other and that counted), but the professor also graded us on our grading skills! This worked on so many levels.
As an undergraduate our group work was graded on the product. There had to be four names to the project and each person got the same grade. In real life it is about the product and learning to deal with lazy or uncooperative people not of your choosing.
It was not necessarily fair in that slackers got the same grade as the person who did most of the work - but it was a great learning experience.
I have tried different approaches in the different courses I've had the opportunity to teach so far. Overall, the peer evaluation helps only somewhat, as people either give each other 100% or very low marks. Rarely do I get an "honest" submission. However, when I get a group of four students, and three students rate each other as full participants and one as a non-participant, while the non-participant rates everyone as equally functioning, it serves as a flag. I can then go back and look at the work, and if necessary bring them in for individual or group conferences.
Even if I am not getting "honest" feedback on the actual work being done, it is an incentive to not slack off where the others could "punish" you. As Dr. Girlfriend said, they are adults...nothing we can do can force them to be mature and professional with each other, we just can give them opportunities to learn those skills.
I tried peer evaluation and that didn't seem to help all that much. I do always let them know that even if I am grading as a group that I will grade people in the group differentially if I believe the contributions were not equally distributed. In the problem cases it is pretty easy to figure out. It doesn't necessarily stop people from getting out of work but the people who are doing the lionshare feel a sense of equity.
The trick to this is to make sure the students all know they will be evaluating each other on their group participation and cooperation. Usually when someone is being disruptive, it's because there are not doing their share of the project.
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