ARTICLE # 1 | 11
THE PRO AND CONS OF GROUP WORK ASSESSMENT IN PROBLEM-BASED LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS
introduced by group marks as the students would have opportunities to exhibit their potentials through individual performance . Additional measures of appropriating a fraction of the overall group assessment weight to self and / or peer evaluation in terms of contribution to the group task could also be useful in addressing the cons of group assessments ( Parsons and Drew , 1996 ; Mellor , 2009 ). The recommended analytical approaches coupled to highend support and effective facilitation by the teaching staff seems to be the way forward to enhance performance , reduce marking bias and encourage effective participation .
1 . Clever ’ students do not get sufficient credit for their work . 2 . Unequal contributions from team members unfairly affect grades . 3 . Lazy students can ‘ hide ’ from staff members . 4 . Group work slows down the learning process due to unproductive time , e . g . meetings . 5 . Group work impacts on other work due to the extra demands on student time . 6 . Group composition unfairly affects one group over another , e . g . skills make-up , personality clashes .
Table 1 . Myths of group work providing an impediment to choosing it as an approach ( After Healey et al . ( 1996 ), Parsons and Drew ( 1996 ) and Livingston ( 2000 )).