Group vs Individual Assessments

Canvas has the ability to manage students working in groups. Student groups can be used as a collaborative tool so that they can work together on group projects and/or assessments.

Group work vs Group Assessments

You can assign students to work in groups for both assessed and non-assessed work. For example, you could put students in groups for a research project, but assessments related to the project are individual. The advantage of doing this is that students get the benefit of doing collaborative work, but assessments are easier for you to manage.

Working in a Canvas group has benefits:

• Support student engagement and collaboration
• Manually or automatically assigned groups
• No limits to the number of groups. Students can work in pairs or groups of any size
• Designated group leaders
• Moving students between groups
• Viewing all activity within groups
• Group calendars
• Group discussions
• Group conferences
• Group announcements

The above allows students to collaborate more closely with others in their group, e.g. if every group was researching a different topic, they could have a discussion that wasn’t interrupted by others, or you could easily arrange a Teams meeting using Announcements with only that group.

There are benefits to working in a group:

• Break down complex tasks
• Plan and manage time
• Refine understanding through discussion
• Giving feedback to peers
• Developing communication skills

Your students need these skills, but assessing group work is not easy. NZQA requires that all Learning Outcomes (LOs) are assessed for each student. A large group assessment may mean that students break down the assessment in such a way as to make this impossible (the ‘You do this bit and I’ll do that bit’ approach).

For this reason, you may find it better to use group work for non-summative assessments.

Group vs Individual Assessments

Assessments in your PAD document are either individual or group. An assessment is assumed to be individual unless group is specified. This is due to the nature, weighting, and type of assessment.

If an assessment is a group assessment, you need to carefully consider how many students are in a group. If an assessment covers more than one LO, all LOs must be met by all students. You need to carefully manage how students divide up tasks.