Pilot Test: Group Project Report & Digital Signature
Problem
Making each student accountable in a group project has been a challenge in one or two groups each semester. 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.
Designing a group project in a manner that would assign different tasks to individuals is not always possible or educationally feasible. While improving the curriculum design (i.e., making the curriculum more relevant to each student) is the mainstream approach to this issue, it still leaves out some students who are not used to being a hard worker, and they would often negatively influence the group dynamics.
Designing a group project in a manner that would assign different tasks to individuals is not always possible or educationally feasible. While improving the curriculum design (i.e., making the curriculum more relevant to each student) is the mainstream approach to this issue, it still leaves out some students who are not used to being a hard worker, and they would often negatively influence the group dynamics.
Research Questions
After several semesters of contemplating whether I should do this or not, I have decided to give it a try. As a remedy for this problem, I pilot-tested the project report form and digital signature that I had developed. I hypothesize that implementing the group project report form and digital signature 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.
Design of Group Project Report & Digital Signature
① Group Project Report
The Group Project Report form is designed to collect the information about individual contributions to each group project. Each group must fill out a task summary table (see Figure 1) for each member of the group. The task summary table consists of:
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A completed form will look like below (Figure 2).
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).
③ When a Student Selected 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