Atelier Geelong The assessment of a group design project

Two major design projects were set for the 2003 first semester studio at Deakin. To use scarce teaching resources efficiently, the first was a team design project taught by two tutors largely through group tutorials, and the second was an individual project taught by four tutors seeing individual students for one-to-one tutorials lasting for twenty minutes. The third-year students were asked therefore to divide themselves into groups of three for their first major design project - "Atelier Geelong," a program that has been running for three years and which has been the prime focus of our teaching and learning research at Deakin. What follows is an examination of the progression of this program over this period, and of the models that have been developed to assess the design teams taking part in it.

The Atelier was to be designed by three students to provide living accommodation and studio schemes for Geelong graduates and a supervising tutor. The project was organized in such a way that the design could readily be subdivided into three distinct elements. The brief concluded:

“Of course, the design of your Atelier might counter this subdivision or even further it. This is unimportant, what is important is that at around three to four weeks into the project the design team must break their submission and presentation, and hence the focus of each individual member, into three separately appraisable elements."

The submission requirement described in this paragraph highlights the problem of many in a taught team design project. For what is commonly desired is one design solution that reads as consistent and 'seamless', but one that allows for the separate appraisal of those who devised it. And of course this - the best of both worlds- is difficult to achieve and, moreover, it is fundamentally conflicting. In 2003, the solution to this problem was to award each team member the same grade for the product of the team design - this being an overall building scheme for the Atelier - and also to assess a product of each individual's contribution to this - which took the form of the detailed design of one element of the building.

This solution gave rise to a number of problems. Firstly, the requirement for separately appraisable elements proved difficult for students to satisfactorily fulfil. Many had to compensate in the team-design submission for poor performing team-mates so had little time to spend on their own individual submission. Even when teams where collaborating well, students tended to 'detail' a building element in isolation from their team-mates, whether it be a separate structure such as a studio or accommodation unit or a constructional element such as a staircase or cladding detail. The requirement for students to focus on an individual submission tended therefore to undermine team-work, which commonly led in the final stages of the project to piecemeal design with little cohesion.

It was subsequently suggested that for 2004 the requirement for separately appraisable work would only be introduced towards the end of the project - when presentation became the focus, for presentation by its very nature demands the delegation of tasks. Yet students rightly objected that an individual's comparative contribution to the team would then be assessed largely on presentation skills. The teaching staff concluded that if the desired outcome of team design was a consistent and seamless solution that reflected the type of collaboration demanded by professional practice, then the product of the design process could only be assessed as a team product. This suggested that the assessment of an individual's contribution to the project would have to focus on the process of design rather than its end product. As teaching staff are party to only a fraction of this process then only the students themselves could accurately evaluate contributions to this process. Let us then briefly look now at how the peer assessment model was developed in light of this.

If the Atelier designs were assessed entirely as team submissions by awarding everyone in the team the same grade, experience suggested that the more conscientious students would be aggrieved by what they often saw in past group projects as an inequality in their workload. As one student complained in a questionnaire completed at the conclusion of the 2003 Atelier project by sixty-five students out of the ninety-three cohort, "it is easy to freeride in a group, and, unfairly, it is us the hard workers that have to carry the lazy ones." Free-riding had in 2003 commonly led to resentment that in some cases led to conflict within the teams, thus undermining the collaborative process. Dissatisfaction with the assessment of the product of team-design was reflected in the questionnaire, for when asked "do you think that everyone in your team contributed evenly?" 82% of the 2003 students who completed the questionnaire answered "no."

It was apparent that a mechanism would have to be built into assessment that rewarded those who worked hard whilst penalizing those who did not. In other group projects at Deakin, students were commonly asked to peer-assess each other's contribution to the team at the conclusion of a project. This model appeased those aggrieved with under-performing team-mates. However, the model suffered from one major problem, namely that the adjustment in grades from only one peer assessment process could be extremely inaccurate. If a number of students were feeling particularly vindictive, their exaggerated misallocation of marks could unfairly penalize team-mates. Peer assessment grades proved therefore unreliable, and this required assessors to readjust grades in line with their knowledge of students in the studio - a knowledge which was often a misleading indication of an individual's contribution to the process of design.

In 2004, it was made clear to students that peer assessment would be continuous throughout the project and would evaluate, therefore, an individual's contribution to the process of design rather than its end product. Contribution here was defined in terms wider than merely time and effort to acknowledge imagination, creativity and team-working skills throughout the duration of the project. This system might have appeased those who felt aggrieved at free-riding had it not been for the choice of peer assessment that was offered to the teams. The students were asked to choose one of three options of mark allocation to be agreed upon in a team contract they signed at the beginning of the project; these were by either: round the table 'bargaining', by secret ballot, or by simply allocating marks evenly. Most complaints about unfairness in marking arose with the somewhat idealistic teams that perhaps rather naively chose the third option, and this was the majority, for many students abused the security of what was effectively a team grade to exploit their more conscientious team-mates. In contrast, the teams that adopted the assessment methods that allowed for penalty and reward saw the allocation of marks as less unfair. The vast majority of students in these teams described in their reflective portfolios the group project as a positive experience. The process of round the table 'bargaining', however, proved understandably stressful for all but the most harmonious of teams, for the conflict of 'bargaining' was poorly resolved and this undermined subsequent team-work. Anonymous peer assessment avoided these problems and was therefore further developed for the next cohort required to take part in Atelier. The problems faced by the teams who had not opted for anonymous peer review was reflected in a general dissatisfaction with the assessment process, for in the end-of-semester questionnaire, when asked "do you think that everyone in your team contributed evenly?" 67% of the seventy-two students who completed the questionnaire in 2004 answered "no."

In 2005, an online and compulsory peer and self-assessment template was developed that allowed students to assess each other’s contribution on a weekly basis within the secure and anonymous environment of the school intranet portal. Students logged in at the end of each of the six weeks of the project to complete a six-sheet Excel chart that asked each student to rate their team-mates using two quantitative measures and one qualitative measure. The first asked students to award their four peers a percentage of the team grade such that any figure over a total of 400% was subtracted from their own percentage to make a total of 500% for the five team-members. This built self-assessment into the peer assessment. As students often awarded each other unrealistic multipliers of the team mark, this first measure was backed up by a second that asked students to rate each other on a five-point multiple-response Likert scale evaluation. This Likert evaluation also allows for the coding of responses and the subsequent statistical analysis of possible patterns of bias in student assessments. The purpose of the third quantitative measure, which asked students to comment on the performance of their peers, was to elucidate upon any anomalies or unexpected final evaluations.

اخر الاخبار

اخبار العتبة العباسية المقدسة

قسم التطوير يبحث آفاق التعاون المشترك مع المعهد العالي لإعداد وتأهيل القادة

إدارة العتبة العباسية المقدسة تطلع على آليات تطوير المهارات الحِرَفية بقسم صناعة الشبابيك

سماحة السيد الصافي يؤكد أهمية التدريب المستمر وتطوير قدرات الملاكات الطبية للارتقاء بالخدمات الصحية

العتبة العباسية المقدسة تقيم مجلسًا عزائيًا لإحياء ذكرى شهادة الإمام الكاظم (عليه السلام)

المزيد

الآخبار الصحية

6 فواكة تساعدك على الشعور بتحسّن عند المرض

حفاظا على صحة العين.. هذا أفضل وقت لتناول فيتامين أ

الاستخدام اليومي لسماعات الأذن.. أخطر مما تتصور !

هل توقيت نشاطك اليومي يؤثر على صحة دماغك؟.. العلماء يجيبون

المزيد

الآخبار التكنلوجية

ابتكار ألماني قد يغيّر مستقبل صناعة البلاستيك

تحديثات وأرباح عبر المشاهدات.. ما الذي تخطط له "لينكد إن"؟

"الكوكايين الوردي".. مخدر جديد يثير قلق السلطات الأميركية

دراسة: تغيّرات في أسلوب القيادة قد تكشف مبكرا عن الخرف !

المزيد

مواضيع ذات صلة

Parents with Learning Disabilities CONCLUSION

PROVISION OF SUPPORT

CARING FOR CHILDREN

EUGENICS AND ETHICAL ISSUES

PARENTING

DISCRIMINATION AND DIVERSITY

THE HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

Parents with Learning Disabilities

Legislation and Learning Disabilities CONCLUSION

LEGAL SAFEGUARDS

MENTAL CAPACITY ACT 2005

THE HUMAN RIGHTS ACT 1998