EVALUATION OF GROUP PROJECTS: AN EXAMPLE OF GOOD PRACTICE FROM HERIOT-WATT UNIVERSITY (UK) AND POTENTIAL APPLICABILITY TO EDUCATION STUDENTS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF GRANADA (SPAIN)

Though almost all of working life is spent as part of a team, it is not common practice in Spain to evaluate students for a major project dissertation in groups rather than as individuals (this applies to both undergraduate "Trabajo Fin de Grado" (TFG) projects and masters "Trabajo Fin de Master" (TFM) projects). In the current system, each student develops and presents an individual final project, and a committee formed by academics is assigned to evaluate it. As the number of university students in Spain tends to be higher than in other western countries, such as the UK, the mentoring process and the evaluation of these final projects by academics can be very time-consuming. We illustrate this problem using two degree programme examples from the University of Granada (UGR). More than 300 individual undergraduate projects are evaluated every year for the degree of Primary Education Teacher Training while, for the Teacher Training Master, the numbers are around 80 projects per year for the science specialty.

There is, therefore, a potential opportunity to improve the learning process for larger Spanish class sizes via a major team project and associated peer assisted learning.

In this paper, we use an example of the mentoring and evaluation of group projects applied by staff from the Institute of Petroleum Engineering (IPE) at Heriot-Watt University, UK in their Reservoir Evaluation and Management (REM) MSc programme (one of three MSc programmes available in IPE, that use a group project model for teaching). Their methodology reduces the bias produced by the presence of weak students in the group, the different backgrounds of the students and other potential issues that may bias one team against another. Moreover, the evaluation system used promotes an individual assessment of each team member within the group, based not only on their technical performance developing their part of the project, but also on their ability to work as part of the team.

The paper compares the methods used by IPE to evaluate final projects and provides grounds to propose potential applications of the IPE methodology to the Education degrees taught at other universities, including University of Granada (UGR). The Heriot-Watt system for the formation of groups, the general mentoring process and the evaluation criteria may be useful to establish a new system at UGR that would save time and resources when applied to TGMs and TFMs in degrees with a high number of students. The correct application of the methodology would ensure a fair evaluation of the team project as a whole, while obtaining an individual mark for each student.