This time of year always has me and my colleagues thinking about the way we cumulatively assess our students in the PBL courses. Since cooperation and problem solving are so important to us we are committed to having some type of collaborative experience as part of the final “exam” but we also have a committment to assessing the content knowledge as well. It’s a difficult thing to balance though, as many of you know. However, since we have come to the decision that this course is really about depth and not breadth, we do not believe that the main focus should be on testing memorization of fact or to see if they can do “one of every problem” that we covered this year.

We have split our two hour final “exam” into a group problem solving experience from which the students receive part of their exam grade (and they turn in one paper as a group). The rest of the exam grade comes from an individual 40-minute performance they do on their own. In general, the grades come out very much as we expect for individual students. During the group problem solving part (approximately one hour and 20 minutes), the teachers walk around and observe the interactions in the groups – who’s leading, who’s following, who’s just sitting back and others do the work. This factors into their grade. We also allow students to give feedback into how the group worked together and for alternative answers if they require it.

If anyone has questions about the way we write questions or would like to talk about assesment in PBL, please post some questions in the Forum about it. Looking forward to doing some more work about assessment in my course at the PEA conference this summer.