What is a collaborative assessment?
Group collaborative assessment is when two or more learners attempt to assess some aspect or aspects of their own learning together.
In other words, the focus in a collaborative assessment is on what the group thinks they have learned.
Two questions to compare collaborative with self assessment
In a nutshell:
Learner self-assessment asks this question:
- “How good am I?”
Collaborative group assessment asks this question:
- “How good are we?”
Some other guidelines for collaborative assessment
Collaborative assessment can be informal. And 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 here 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.
