What is collaborative assessment and what’s it for?

Collaborative assessment is a kind of self-assessment where the group assesses themselves. This contrasts with learner self-assessment as we discussed earlier where each learner assesses their own skills or abilities.

To put it another way:

• Learner self-assessment asks this question: “How good am I?”
• Collaborative group assessment asks this question: “How good are we?”

Collaborative assessment should focus on what the group thinks they have learned. This means that it’s probably more practical to use as formative or summative assessment.

The focus might relate to goals that you or the group set earlier, things that they thought they did well, or things they need to work on.

The same guidelines apply as for self-assessment. This means that collaborative assessment may not be as appropriate for very low-level learners including ESOL learners.

Collaborative assessment tends to be discussion-based. And if you have pre-literate learners they may lack the language they need for this.

Collaborative group assessment doesn’t mean that everyone has to agree with everyone else either. For example, a good outcome for a collaborative assessment may include a discussion and list of what people do and don’t agree on with regards to their progress.

We have a collaborative assessment task that you can use or modify that we’ll share in the next section.