Group Project Reports
Form Design
The Group Project Report is a part of each group project, and each project group must fill out and submit the form (Figure 1) along with their group project.
Each group must fill out a task summary table for each member of the group. The task summary table consists of:
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When the form is filled out, it kind of looks like the pictures below (Figure 2).
Digital Signature
Each student is also required to sign their group project report digitally. I do it by having students submit a digital form certifying that their project report is accurate enough. I do this to ensure the accuracy and reliability of their group project reports. I created the form by using the survey tool in Canvas LMS. All students need to do is to click the survey button (Figure 3) and answer the 2 simple questions (Figure 4).
The first question asks whether their Group Project Report is accurate or not and the second question asks for explanations if the student thinks the report is not accurate (Figure 5).
What If Some Students Said the Report was "Not accurate"?
That's when I personally investigate if there were in fact students who didn't contribute to the group work. For example, I may request some students to:
- show me the resources they collected
- give me the editing right to their Google Slides/Docs
- show me which parts of the materials they helped create
If it turned out that some students didn't contribute enough to the projects/assignments, they will receive less points according to their real contributions to the projects/assignments.
Why Do I Do This?
Every semester I have a couple of students expressing their frustrations with some group members who do not do their share of work or who care little about the finishing quality of their work. Of all the 10-12 groups, there are always a couple of groups that do not take the coursework seriously. When everyone in those groups doesn't care, they deserve the poor grades that they receive, but when there are some students who actually care in those groups, it is definitely not fair for those caring students.
After several semesters of contemplating whether I should do this or not, I have decided to give it a try. I hypothesize that implementing the group project report may produce the following positive outcomes:
- The transparency of individual task details on the report will motivate students to contribute to their group more actively.
- The transparency of individual task details on the report will make individual students accountable for the finishing quality of the tasks, which may motivate students to do better quality work.
- Having to fill out a task summary table for each student may encourage the group to delegate some tasks to all students in the group even though some students lack sufficient skills and experience to make substantial contributions to the group work.
- Not being able to get away with doing little work will prevent students from slacking, and may foster the group culture to actively engage toward the project completion.
Research on Students' Attitudes for Group Projects
Since I am not sure if this will actually improve the situation, I implemented this only in one of the two sections that I teach.
At the end of the semester, I will have students in both sections take a survey about group projects and find out if the group project reports have made any difference to how students contributed to group projects. I will find out whether the four hypotheses I listed above will be true or not.
The results will be summarized and reported in the form of a research paper or online article, which will be shared on this page.