Curious about FeedbackFruits? See how its Group Member Evaluation tool can help create fair individual assessment in team assignments.
In the Tertiary Foundation Course for Business with around 100 students, fair individual evaluations in team assignments were a challenge. Discover how the teaching staff tackled this using FeedbackFruits’ Group Member Evaluation tool.
Course: TFCBUS 92F: Foundation Business
Class size: ~ 100
Tool used: Group Member Evaluation
Insights shared by: Nuddy Pillay (course coordinator and facilitator)
The course
Tertiary Foundation Course for Business is a comprehensive introductory course that goes beyond teaching basic business concepts. It also develops essential soft skills crucial for success in the business world, including management principles, effective teamwork strategies, and interpersonal skills for working with diverse groups.
The challenge
Team assignments can be fun and useful, but fairly assessing each teammate’s work is challenging. In TFCBUS 92F, with around 100 students in teams, assessing individual contributions is difficult. Traditional methods of giving identical marks to all team members often fail, as they don’t address issues like unequal participation (‘freeriding’) or recognise exceptional contributors.
Kia ora koutou, This is the peer feedback component of your team. you will complete two evaluations one in week 9 – NOT FOR MARKS and one later in the course in week 12 – FOR MARKS. They are done to support your learning about working in teams and to ensure each team member has an individual mark based on your performance in your team. In this activity, you will be asked to provide feedback to your team members. In your evaluation, you will be required to submit ratings on a ruberic, and make comments to support your rating. Once all feedback has been provided, you can return to this activty to receive the feedback by your team members. Here is a video to guide you in completing this evaluation: link to video If you prefer to read and not watch the video here is a link to an article which explains what you need to do: link to video
Figure 1: Nuddy’s email to students
A student-centred approach
Nuddy adopted a collaborative solution by inviting students to help revise the rubric for evaluating individual team members. This ensured the assessment criteria were relevant and fair from the students’ perspective, increasing their understanding and acceptance of the evaluation process, and motivating them to engage actively.
The assessment design was based on ‘assessment for learning’, aligning with the University’s Signature Pedagogical Practices. Students working in teams throughout the semester had two opportunities to assess their teammates’ contributions.
Figure 2: Class teams in action
Solution: FeedbackFruits as fair and robust evaluator
To manage this collaborative approach effectively at scale, Nuddy used technology (see Technology-enhanced learning for more). Leveraging the FeedbackFruits’ Group Member Evaluation tool allowed him to:
- Efficiently collect and analyse peer evaluations from numerous teams
- Receive and store digital artefacts as evidence of individual contributions
- Gather quantitative scores and qualitative feedback from students
The implementation was carefully structured:
- All teamwork evaluation activities were piloted in Semester One, 2024 without grades.
- The first five weeks involved teaching teamwork skills, scaffolding their knowledge, and preparing students for effective peer evaluation.
- The first evaluation in Week 9 was not for marks but provided formative feedback to team members about how their engagement in their team was perceived by their team members. They were provided with quantitative and qualitative feedback. In Week 12 they assessed each other for 5% of the course mark for their level of engagement in team activities to complete the team output (creating a digital artefact).
Groupwork evaluations rubric. Measurement criteria are based upon: Team project meetings, contribution to the team project, behaviour relating to the task, behaviour relating to their relationship with the team. The scale ranges from: Beginning, developing, competent, or I don’t know the student.
Figure 3: The groupwork evaluations rubric
Note of caution about Gen-AI
Since FeedbackFruits has its own integrated AI tool (Acai) for feedback generation, Nuddy cautioned students to consider the context and cultural differences of the machine-generated feedback. Gen-AI often encourages overly positive responses, sometimes making the feedback inappropriate or out of context. It also lacks cultural sensitivity, which is problematic in diverse cohorts like TFCBUS, where students are encouraged to present their authentic selves. This course helped prepare students to engage critically with Gen-AI outputs in the future.
Outcomes and insights
Having trialled the Group Member Evaluation feature in his course, Nuddy observed improved student engagement, an evidenced-based assessment of individual contributions, and development of valuable peer evaluation skills.
Students appreciated that FeedbackFruits, using their peer evaluations against a rubric they co-designed with the lecturer, provided a robust, evidence-based mechanism for assessing each other’s contributions. This approach ensured that the tool fairly summarised and evaluated their inputs, leading to a more transparent and accepted assessment process.
Overall, his experience offers valuable insights for educators teaching large cohorts:
- Student collaboration can help solve complex assessment challenges.
- Educational technology can make sophisticated pedagogical approaches feasible at scale.
- Transparency and co-creation in assessment design can enhance student engagement.
Individualised assessment is achievable in very large courses with appropriate tools and methods.
Looking ahead
After successfully piloting the FeedbackFruits tool in TFCBUS 92F, Nuddy hopes to use it again for a marked activity at the end of the course. He also trialled Group Member Evaluation in his much larger BUSINESS 111 course (which has 1,700 students!) as an unmarked activity and observed high student engagement (around 80% response rate) with the tool. He’d like to use the tool again as it considerably reduces the workload for teaching staff at such scale. However, one must be mindful of the innovative load on students; introducing too many educational technology innovations at once can be overwhelming, especially for first-year students.
We welcome hearing about your experiences or questions regarding team assessment in large classes. How might you adapt this approach in your teaching context? Drop us a line! Email: teachwell@auckland.ac.nz
See also
FeedbackFruits
Find out more about the Peer Review Assignment and Group Member Evaluation tools.