General

The PETS process (Proactively Ensuring Team Success) is a multifaceted approach to creating effective, productive and happy student teams.  It has been tested and evaluated and continuously improved since 2002.  It is not a quick fix but successfully addresses team dysfunction and social loafing through team selection, peer assessment, mentoring, and team training.  A manual for this process can be found at: http://ceit.uq.edu.au/content/pets.  Contact Lydia Kavanagh if you have any queries and see http://www.aaee.com.au/conferences/papers/2007/paper_66.pdf for an early write up of this work.

Support for student teams 

An electronic module (Working in Teams) containing information on team work was developed as part of an ALTC project.  It includes the reasoning behind students working in teams, a troubleshooter for dysfunctional teams, and templates for good team practice.  It can be used as part of the course assessment or as a student resource.  It is available at: http://ceit.uq.edu.au/content/pets.  Contact Lydia Kavanagh if you have any queries .

Personality type also affects how people work in groups.

Peer assessment

One of the most important things in peer assessment is to feedback to the students early in semester how they are performing.  This allows individuals to increase effort if necessary and allows teams to explicitly deal with any dysfunction.  Explicit mentoring is important to facilitate this. 

There are many online peer assessment tools that are available to help with this process:

CatME (Purdue University, Proprietary): https://engineering.purdue.edu/CATME

SparkPlus (UTS, Keith Willey, Proprietary): http://spark.uts.edu.au/ (SparkPlus does an amazing amount of other things too!)

TeamWorker (QUT, Les Dawes): http://eprints.qut.edu.au/39388/1/c39388.pdf (This is a paper about the software.)

WebPA (University of Loughborough, free): http://webpaproject.lboro.ac.uk/

WebPAf (UQ, Lydia Kavanagh, free): http://ceit.uq.edu.au/content/pets (A modified version of WebPA which just looks at peer assessment.)

References

Teamwork assessment: http://www.adelaide.edu.au/clpd/online/assessonline/groupwork/

Teamwork in general: http://www.dlsweb.rmit.edu.au/eng/beng0001/learning/teamwork/

                                    : http://www.iml.uts.edu.au/learnteach/groupwork/index.html

                                    : http://www.cshe.unimelb.edu.au/assessinglearning/03/group.html

Teamwork in all its facets: http://www.ryerson.ca/lt/resources/collaborativelearning/CLResources.html

And you might like to consider Peer review: http://www.reap.ac.uk/PEER/Project.aspx  
(Peer review refers to scenarios where students are asked to evaluate the quality of the work produced by fellow students and to provide each other with feedback.  The project undertaken by The University of Strathclyde focuses on scenarios where students are engaging in complex tasks such as writing an essay, producing a report or a design, and where the feedback entails a qualitative analysis of what is being or has been produced e.g. an evaluation of the work against criteria and the provision of a written explanation.) Turnitin now has a neat process to facilitate this.

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