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Designing and assessing group work
Designing and assessing group work

Designing and assessing group work

Published on: 11/03/2025 · Last updated on: 12/03/2025

The challenge of group work assessment

Assessment is one of the most challenging aspects of teaching and learning, and group assessment, in spite of its many benefits, is perhaps the trickiest assessment of all to manage. Even though it has potential to provide a manageable assessment method for large cohorts and an authentic opportunity for students to collaborate and develop skills, it can often end up leaving staff and students floundering as tensions rise, group dynamics break down and claims of unequal contribution surface.

Our guidance has been created in recognition of this and to support colleagues to navigate some of the most common challenges associated with group work.

Download and read our Group Work Guide

All of our group work recommendations and resources can be accessed in our downloadable group work guide.

Many of the examples or advice provided have been drawn directly from good practice at the University of Bath, where colleagues have explored practical solutions to these commonly experienced challenges.

We have broken down the design and implementation of group work into key areas with a range of relevant recommendations and resources for you to explore in each. You will likely find that a combination of strategies from different sections, adapted to your individual, course or department requirements, is most successful.

Key aspects of group work design

An quick overview of each key area of the guide is available below. Please see the group work guide for full information and resources.

In this section we outline key points to consider when designing group work. Whether thinking about implementing group work for summative assessment or more generally, as a tool to support teaching and learning, we cover a range of considerations which will help to ensure that group work is effective and forms a cohesive part or the students’ learning and assessment journey. We also outline how group work tasks can be designed in such a way to encourage ‘interdependence’, ensuring that students work together as a team rather than tackling tasks individually.

It is through our marking criteria and in particular how we weight this criteria to award marks, that we demonstrate to students the value we place on different aspects of an assessment.

In this section we outline how to assess for the process of group working as well as the final product. We also introduce our ‘Iceberg of Equal Contribution’ to encourage students to think more holistically about the ways in which different group members can meaningfully contribute to group work. We also cover the concept of marking lenses and discuss possible approaches to peer marking. Example peer marking grids, editable to suit your local context, are included in the Resources section.

This section outlines some of the benefits of strategic group selection, before discussing the pros and cons of various allocation methods in different situations. It also outlines the tools available at the University of Bath to help support group allocation.

Collaboration is vital to the success of group work, yet this can often be tricky to establish and manage.In this section we explore ways in which you might build trust and confidence within your groups and outline possible barriers students might face which can undermine their ability to collaborate with others. We also look at conflict resolution and what to do when things go wrong.

Resources

Below are a number of resources from our group work guide. These can be downloaded and edited to suit your particular teaching context.

Further support

If you would like to discuss further support for group work design and assessment please contact clt@bath.ac.uk. We are happy to deliver workshops tailored to your/your colleagues’ context.

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