Fenia Aivaloglou | Teamwork and Group Assignments in Computer Science

When including group assignments in our courses we, as instructors, must take several decisions: should we assign the student teams, or should we let the students decide who their teammates will be? Should we be monitoring the projects’ source course repositories? How should we identify and act upon slacking or overachieving members? Should we give all team members the same grade, or should we differentiate, and how? In our research we have explored the experiences and perceptions of students on assignment setup, grading and monitoring, and we have experimented with tools for monitoring contributions and for fair division of the grades. We found that group work is often not divided equally, that several factors affect student perceptions on grade fairness, and that students tend to specialize early in terms of their allocated tasks.