PEER'S CONTRIBUTION TO GROUP WORK: WHAT IT MEANS TO STUDENTS

Peer assessment has long been exercised in educational settings where students are required to do group work. The literature on peer assessment reveals that educators focus on how to give grades to each member of a team working on a group project as fairly and accurately as possible under the umbrella term, "contribution". One frequently used instrument for peer assessment is peer evaluation questionnaires. Team members are given "contribution" marks - usually in percentage - by their peers and a peer factor, calculated from these marks, is then used in determining each member's final mark. Yet there is still no widely-accepted and published definition of the term "contribution" that is grounded in empirical data. Questions in peer evaluation questionnaires are normally derived from the literature and the questionnaire designers' ( educators') own experience of what team "contribution" means. But how representative are these questions, of what the term "team contribution", means to students? For example, a rating of an individual member's task performance is commonly included in these questionnaires. However, to the students' eyes task performance might not be as important a contributing factor as one's participation in the group work. Furthermore, in an ideal team, members are to make decisions together and accept the outcomes of these decisions together. To penalise academically weaker members who have participated fully could therefore be considered as unfair and against both the spirit and virtue of teamwork. This paper analyses qualitative data extracted from the justification for the ratings of team members' contribution to a group assignment project from students in a large first year cohort and suggests questions that could be included in a peer's contribution evaluation questionnaire from both students and educators' perspectives for conducting peer assessment.