Assessing the Individual in Team Based Design Projects

Abstract

Project-based learning (PBL) has become a common practice engineering schools, often used in the context of design projects. Team based design projects allow the assessment of a broad range of graduate attributes, such as teamwork, communication, professionalism, ethics, project management, problem solving and design. Assessment of these skills is often qualitative, making assessment more difficult and varied than technical, quantitatively assessed subjects.Most often when we grade the outputs of team-based projects, we assess the team as a whole; assigning one grade to the entire team. Whether it is project reports, formative and summative, presentations or group assignments, team members share a mark. Tools such as peer and self-evaluations and contribution attestations are sometimes used to modify the marks assigned to individuals, relating the relative engagement of students within the team, but they do not clearly link the direct learning outcomes of individuals to specific attributes. Shared grading is done for several reasons. Logistically, it is significantly less workload to mark a single report per group, than to mark individual reports. Second, in professional work, the output of a team is what is important, and is the primary indicator of success. In an academic environment however, it is the specific learning outcomes of the individuals that we wish to assess.